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By the same author: 
Yale Talks 
What Is Your Name? 


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Where Do You Live? 


by 7 
Charles Reynolds Brown 


Dean of the Divinity School 
Yale University 















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Copyright, 1926, by Yale University Press 
Printed in the United States of America 





First published, April, 1926 
Second printing, October, 1928 


Preface 


HERE is a feeling in certain quarters that 

college students in these days are openly 
irreligious. That verdict seems to me unwarranted. 
I know something about the prevailing moods on 
the Campus. I am Pastor of the College Church 
in Yale and have been a member of the Faculty 
for the last fifteen years. During that time I have 
given religious addresses and held conferences in 
one hundred and thirty-six different colleges and 
universities. In all these contacts I have had “ears 
to hear” what the students were saying, in order 
that I might get their point of view. 

The young folks are not so orthodox in their 
beliefs as John Calvin was. They are not so punc- 
tilious in the outward observances of religion as 
Lord Chesterfield was. They show little or no 
interest in the emotional type of evangelism. They 
frankly regarded the whole attitude of certain 
religious leaders at Dayton, Tennessee, toward 
the findings of modern science as highly amusing. 

If these attitudes of mind and heart stamp one 
as irreligious, then the young people are thrice 
guilty. But there are many of us who feel that all 
that has to do with the outside rather than “the 
inside of the cup.” It has to do with “the tithing 


Vil 


Preface 


of mint, anise and cummin” rather than with “the 
weightier matters” of justice, mercy and truth. 

In their desire for a more competent, workable 
philosophy of life, in their determination to bring 
a larger measure of moral idealism into the ordi- 
nary round and round, in their open scorn for 
anything hollow or perfunctory in religion, and in 
the response which tens of thousands of them are 
making to the great vital truths of our common 
Christian faith, I find an attitude which is any- 
thing but irreligious. 

Their Christian impulse may seek other forms 
of expression than those which were current when 
I was a college student, but I am sure that the 
impulse is there, “in force” as military men would 
say, and that it is a magnificent reality to be reck- 
oned with in all the plans we make for the coming 
of the kingdom of God on earth. 

The fathers and mothers of many of these 
young people, as well as the students themselves, 
have shown a friendly interest in my two former 
books of this same type, Yale Talks and What Is 
Your Name? Some of them, like Oliver Twist, 
have asked for “more.” Here then is another 
helping! 

These chapters also are “talks” rather than 
treatises on religion. I have retained throughout 
the form of direct address with no attempt at a 
more finished literary style appropriate to that 
which is written primarily to be read rather than 

vill 


Preface 


said. They were all given at Yale and some of 
them also in other colleges. The second one was 
the Matriculation Address here a year ago and 
the last one I used last June as the Baccalaureate 
Address at my own college, the University of 
Towa. 

I have counted it the richest privilege of my 
life to be in touch with this body of young life 
and if any word here may bring cheer or guidance 
to anyone striving to live after the method and 
in the Spirit of Christ, I shall be grateful. 


CHARLES R. BROWN. 
Yale University. 
1926. 





CHAPTER 
I. Where Do You Live? 
II. Have We Outgrown Fear? . 
III. The Jericho Road 
IV. Equipment 
V. The Challenge of the Unattained . 
VI. The Failures of Success 
VII. The Study of Religion . 
VIII. What Is That to Thee? . 
IX. The Man and the Machine . 
X. The Summons of a New Day . 


Contents 


104 


135 





I 
Where Do You Live? 


OU are frequently asked, especially during 

the Freshman year, “Where do you live?” 
Some one is trying to locate you. He feels that he 
might understand your life better if he had you 
related to some set of facts with which he is 
already familiar. 

You name some city, New York, Chicago, San 
Francisco, as the case may be. You have not an- 
swered the man’s question. It may be that was all 
he wanted to know, but his question suggests a 
great deal more than that. 

Now as a matter of fact, where do you really 
live? Two men may reside in the same city and 
yet live as far apart as the North Pole and the 
South Pole. Two men may reside on the same 
street or in the same house and yet have a whole 
continent between them. It is not a question of 
geography. You cannot tell where any man lives 
by looking at the map or in the city directory. 
You must examine the contents of the man. It isa 
question of his own dominant interest. 

In that deeper sense, where do you really live? 
Where are you at home? Where may I address 

I 


Where Do You Liver 


you and be sure of reaching you? It is a vital 
question. If every one would stand up and tell us 
exactly where he lives, it would be more interest- 
ing and more profitable than any sermon ever 
preached. 

You said a moment ago that you lived in Chi- 
cago. What do you mean by “Chicago”? A place ~ 
on the map? A collection of buildings there on the 
west shore of Lake Michigan? That is not “Chi- 
cago”—that is where you will find Chicago. But 
Chicago itself is a vast array of human interests, 
a bewildering complexity of hopes and fears, long- 
ings and yearnings, aspirations and resolves. 

There are ten thousand different Chicagos, 
some of them high and fine, some of them low and 
mean. In what particular “Chicago” are you at 
home? Where in all that mass of interest and 
activity are you rooted, grounded, naturalized, 
domiciled? You see how this question “Where do 
you live?” goes down to the root of the matter. 
It finds every man, aS we say in common phrase, 
“right where he lives.” 


It was so when the question was first asked 
there in my text. John the Baptist saw a majestic 
figure coming down from the north. He saw Jesus 
of Nazareth taking his first steps in that service 
which has changed the moral history of the world. 
And when he saw him approach, he said in rever- 

2 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


ent tones, ‘‘Behold, the Lamb of God! He is tak- 
ing away the sin of the world!” 

“Two of John’s disciples heard him speak and 
they followed Jesus.” And as they saw in his face 
the glory of the Eternal, as they heard the accents 
of power fall from his lips, as they felt a strange, 
mysterious influence stealing in upon their hearts 
while they companied with him, they began to 
wonder where he lived. They wanted to locate 
him in this whirling complexity of interest. They 
wanted to relate him in definite fashion to that 
world of experience which they knew. And they 
said, “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” It was the 
same familiar question—‘‘Where do you live?” 

Where did the Son of man live? In what part 
of the world; in how much of the world? In what 
part of the world and in how much of the world 
does any man live? 

The philosophers tell us that each man’s im- 
pression or perception of the world is the only 
reality there is in the case for him. The only 
world that exists for me is the world that I per- 
sonally can see and hear and feel, the system of 
reality with which I stand related, to which I make 
response. There may be ten thousand other 
worlds, but if they do not enter into my personal 
consciousness, they do not exist for me. Things 
only become real to me as they enter into my own 
immediate experience. 

i 3 


Where Do You Live? 


When we view it in this light what an endless 
variety of worlds there are! What different im- 
pressions are made upon individuals by this sys- 
tem of reality around us and above us and be- 
neath us! | 

The beauty of form and color is not in the 
blind man’s world—rainbows and sunsets do not 
exist for him. It is all as though they were not. 

Melody and harmony are not in the deaf man’s 
world. He lives in a world of unbroken silence. 
The overture to Tannhauser or the fifth sym- 
phony of Beethoven, the songs of the birds and 
the laughter of little children, have no meaning 
and no existence for him. They are not in his 
world. 

The spiritual values, forces and activities, do 
not exist for the man who is dead or indifferent 
to them all. They are not in his world. In every 
case the presence or the absence of a certain fac- 
ulty determines the range of reality for that par- 
ticular man—it determines whether his world 
shall be large or small, rich in content or meager. 


What sort of a world do you live in? How much 
of the world do you live in? It depends not so 
much upon what is outside of you as upon what is 
inside of you. What are your powers of perception 
and appreciation? What is the range of reality 
to which you stand related? To how many differ- 
ent forms of stimulus do you make response? At 


4 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


how many points, on how many levels, do you 
react? This is what determines the real content of 
each man’s world. Some man may reside, so far 
as his post-office address is concerned, in the most 
favored spot on earth and yet live all his days in 
a place as uninteresting as Jersey City. 

Let me illustrate in homely fashion! I take my 
dog with me into the Dresden gallery. He sees all 
that I see, physically speaking. He probably sees 
a great deal more, for his eyesight is better than 
mine: he has never had to succumb to the indig- 
nity of glasses. But when we come out, after visit- 
ing every room, the Sistine Madonna is not in the 
dog’s world. It is in my world. It has been in my 
world ever since I saw it for the first time thirty 
years ago. I see it, I feel it, I rejoice in the in- 
spiration of it even as I stand here. But the dog 
might live out all his days in the Dresden gallery 
and never see it. The Sistine Madonna would not 
enter his world. It is not a question of eyesight 
but of insight. It is the mind that sees more than 
the eyes. 

It is only six feet, more or less, for any of us, 
from one world to the other. Here we are with our 
feet on the ground, of the earth, earthy! Here we 
are dust of its dust and destined to make return! 
Here we are with our heads among the stars, in a 
world of vision, aspiration and high resolve! And 
this world where our minds go is as real as the 
streets and the lanes where our feet go. In which 


5 


Where Do You Liver 


world are you most at home? Where does your 
mind go when it is free to do not what it must but 
what it likes? Where does your heart go in its 
prevailing moods and desires? 

You have cellars in your homes, stored with 
coal and provisions, but you do not live down 
there. You have kitchens where food is prepared, 
and dining-rooms where it is tastefully served, 
but you do not live there, I trust. You have “liv- 
ing-rooms,” as we say, and libraries, with oppor- 
tunities innumerable for intellectual and social 
enjoyment, but you cannot live by these alone. 
Unless you have in your home and in your life 
“an upper room” facing squarely upon the sky, 
looking out upon a horizon bounded by nothing 
nearer than the stars and the being of God, you 
are not living in the world for which you were 
intended. Give me then your full address—and by 
your definition of the world you live in, I shall 
know the quality of your life. 


How many different worlds there are for the 
men we meet in daily life! Here are four men! 
The first man lives in a stream of commodities. 
His world is a river of things to be bought and 
sold. Now it flows this way and now it flows 
that way, but always in such a way as to turn 
the wheels of his mill and grind him out a grist 
of profits. He lives in that stream of commodities 
as a trout lives in the brook. He eats in it, sleeps 

6 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


in it, dreams in it, works in it, seven days in the 
week. He is never out of it for an hour, from 
Monday morning to Sunday night. Talk to him on 
any other topic than that of trade and you find 
him as dull as a pine stump. He feels sure that a 
man’s life does consist in the abundance of the 
things he can buy, a certain eminent authority to 
the contrary notwithstanding. And this is the 
world he lives in: it is the only world he knows. 

Here is another man who lives in a world of 
books, ideas, judgments! He is interested in out- 
looks, insights and discriminations. He knows ten 
times as much about Plato and Aristotle, who 
have been dead two thousand years, as he does 
about Elbert H. Gary, who is very much alive. In 
his world the quotations and transactions have to 
do with the truth, and particularly with that form 
of truth which sets men free from blindness and 
evil. He strives to keep his credit good by keeping 
his eye single, that his whole moral nature may be 
full of light. He feels that “wisdom is the principal 
thing,” that its value is above rubies; and he 
strives with all his getting to get understanding. 
And that is the sort of world he lives in. 

Here is a third man who lives in a world of dis- 
trust, suspicion and insinuation! He rejoices in 
iniquity more than in the truth. He smacks his 
lips over any fresh bit of it which comes his way. 
He prides himself on his freedom from all illu- 
sions and enthusiasms. ‘““They are all devils,” he 


7 


Where Do You Live? 


says; “they all have horns and hoofs hidden away 
under their clothes and conventionalities.” He 
feels that he is simply a smarter devil than the 
rest. He says with a sneer, “Every man has his 
price,” knowing that he has his price. He is cold, 
cynical, disagreeable, untouched by those gener- 
ous enthusiasms which fire the hearts of his fel- 
lows. He lives in that world which Dante saw 
when he wrote the “Inferno.” This man could 
write a description of the Inferno himself as accu- 
rate as a Baedeker. And this world of cynical dis- 
trust is the only world where he feels at home. 
Here is another man whose head is full of 
visions and dreams of better things! He lives in a 
world where everybody is kind and good, hopeful 
and helpful. He is all that. He thinks people gen- 
erally are, as indeed many of them are when he is 
present. He carries with him an atmosphere which 
stimulates the best in every life. He carries the 
atmosphere which Forbes-Robertson carried into 
the boarding house in Bloomsbury in “The Pass- 
ing of the Third Floor Back.” It is an atmosphere 
which has a wholesome effect upon the selfish and 
the sluggish, encouraging them to be kind and 
good, hopeful and helpful. This man appraises 
everything in terms of spiritual value. To him it 
is all property, real and personal, possessed of 
worth unspeakable. He has religion, not as a his- 
tory of something that happened a long time ago, 
not as a remote theory about things, not as a 
8 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


piece of stately ritual. He has religion as an ex- 
perience, as a life. He lives in a world where God 
the Father is above all and in all and through all 
things. And this is his world. 

How far apart these four men seem when we 
look at them! Yet they may all reside in the same 
town and on the same street. Now and then they 
may meet for an hour at the baseball game or in 
the theater or at church. They seem for the mo- 
ment to have a common interest. But the meeting 
breaks up and each man goes his way. Each one 
returns to his own particular world and goes sail- 
ing along through space like the earth on its orbit. 

The sky is a roomy place; the sun, the moon 
and all the stars are there, each one moving on 
its appointed way without touching any of the 
rest. The world of human life is a great, wide, 
roomy place; there is a chance for every conceiv- 
able type. And each man builds up his own par- 
ticular planet of being, his own sphere of action, 
by the relations he sustains, by the values on 
which he sets his heart, by the forms of action 
into which he enters. He builds his own planet of 
life and then moves with it on his own selected 
orbit through this universe of interest. Where in 
all that world of infinite variety do you dwell? 
How much of that world of reality, seen and un- 
seen, has become real to you? 

“How can you live in Goshen?” one man said 
to another, with a note of ill-concealed contempt. 


9 


Where Do You Liver 


And then Edgar Frank replied for the man whose 
domicile had been maligned: 


“T do not live in Goshen— 
I eat here, sleep here, work here; 
I live in Greece, 
Where Plato taught 
And Phidias carved 
And Epictetus wrote. 


“Think not my life is small 
Because you see a puny place, 
I have my books, I have my dreams, 
A thousand souls have left for me 
Enchantment that transcends 
Both time and place. 


“And so I live in Paradise, 
Not here.” 


But let me return again to the original setting 
of the text. The two men asked Christ where he 
lived. “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” 

Speaking after the manner of men, he did not 
live in much of a world. He was born in the man- 
ger of a stable. He was brought up in the home 
of a carpenter at Nazareth. When I was in Na- 
zareth some years ago, they showed me the house. 
It may not have been the identical house—I have 
no idea that it was—but it was some such humble 
affair, for his people were poor. When he grew up 


IO 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


and entered upon his active service going about 
doing good, there were times when he had no- 
where to lay his head. 

He accepted hospitality when it was offered, 
sometimes by rich men like Zacchaeus, sometimes 
by the fairly well-to-do, like Mary and Martha, 
and sometimes by those who were as poor as him- 
self. When nothing offered, he slept out and ate 
the raw wheat which his disciples plucked in the 
fields. When he came to die, he did not die in a 
bed—he died on a cross and his body was laid in 
a borrowed tomb. 

When you study the record of his life, it seems 
to lack any worthy setting. It was a rough world 
for him to live in. The foxes had holes and the 
birds of the air had nests, but the Son of man was 
without worthy residence. 

But where did he actually live during all that 
time? I wish I could tell you. It would make this 
sermon forever memorable. I could not possibly 
put it in words. No man could. He who spoke as 
never man spake could not put it in words. He 
would not even try. When men undertook to 
locate him in this complexity of interest and ac- 
tivity, you remember his reply. He did not name 
a certain city or town. “Rabbi, where dwellest 
thou?” Jesus answered, “Come and see.” Come 
and live in my world! Come and live in it for a 
day, for an hour, and then you will know! It was 
the only way they could know. The greatest 


Il 


Where Do You Liver 


things in life cannot be described—they must be 
seen and felt and experienced at first hand. 


Jesus did not undertake to describe the world 
he lived in but he gave us several significant hints. 
He lived in a world where he could say at any 
moment, “I am not alone, the Father is with me.” 
He had unbrokenly the sense of divine com- 
panionship. He felt that he was allied with the 
Infinite. He claimed kinship with the Eternal. He 
might be walking through a crowded street, the 
people thronging him; he might be asleep in the 
hinder part of a boat; he might be addressing a 
multitude from the hillside; he might be alone at 
prayer on the mountain top. It mattered not—he 
was not alone; the Father was with him. He had 
unbrokenly that sense of an exalted fellowship. 

He lived in a world where he could say, “I 
come not to do mine own will but the will of him 
that sent me.’ He had the sense of mission. He 
did not live by mood or whim. He did not dash 
aimlessly here or there on any passing impulse. 
He was building his life finely and steadily into a 
far-reaching, divine plan. He was shaping his 
course with reference to a purpose which reached 
from the hour when the morning stars sang to- 
gether on to the day when a victorious host shall 
stand before the throne singing the song of moral 
achievement. He was making himself at home in 
those great moral processes which are to bring the 

I2 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


city of God, the ideal social order, down out of 
heaven and set it up in active operation on this 
common earth. He had a plan, a purpose, a goal, 
and he steadfastly set his face toward the great 
fulfillment. “I come not to do mine own will but 
the will of him that sent me.” He lived in a world 
where he had the sense of mission. 

He lived in a world where he could say to all 
the lives he met, “I am among you as one who 
serves.” He was ready and able to do good to 
every life that came within the length of his cable 
tow. It mattered not whether the life was rich or 
poor, cultured or simple, sinful or saintly, he was 
there as one who served. Out among the Gentiles 
it was not so. There the great ones exercised lord- 
ship and dominion. But in Christ’s world, if any 
man would be great he must serve; and the great- 
est of all must be the servant of all. 

He once took a towel and girded himself that 
he might wash the disciples’ feet. He prepared 
himself for that particular act of service. But the 
spirit of service he never put on because he never 
took it off—it was always there, as much a part of 
him as his own right hand. It was as much a part 
of his world as the power of gravitation. He took 
upon himself the form and the spirit of a servant, 
becoming obedient to the exacting demands of an 
exalted usefulness. 


What a world for the Son of man to live in! 
T3 


Where Do You Liver 


What a world for all the sons of men to live in! 
Take those three sides of the triangle and think 
of what they enclose! The sense of divine com- 
panionship, the sense of mission, and the spirit of 
service! 

And this does not exhaust the content of the 
world where he dwelt. I have only pointed to the 
sun, the moon and one of the principal stars. If 
we should undertake to indicate the entire glory 
of that world which he saw around him in the un- 
realized capacity of this human nature for spirit- 
ual advance and in the fullness of that divine help 
upon which he relied, we should need all the 
angels in heaven singing at once and all the wise 
men on earth speaking at once and every created 
thing become vocal to bring out the full content 
of that world which Jesus saw. He had nowhere 
to lay his head, but he lived in a world of surpass- 
ing beauty and of glory unspeakable. 

Words fail us in the face of that prospect! It 
was because he felt himself unable to describe 
what he saw and felt and enjoyed that Jesus said 
to his questioners, “(Come and see.” We can easily 
repeat those three sentences—“The Father is with 
me; I come to do the will of him who sent me; I 
am among you as one that serves’—but if we 
would know the world to which they point we 
must live in it. We must climb its mountains of 
spiritual aspiration. We must traverse its valleys 
of spiritual peace. We must eat the ripe fruit 


14 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


which grows on the tree of life and drink the 
water which flows clear as crystal from the throne 
of God. Come and see! Then you will know! Live 
in the mood and after the method of Christ and 
you will know where he lived. 


How much of a world did his most illustrious 
disciple inhabit? “I am a citizen of no mean city,” 
Paul said. Did he mean Tarsus? That was where 
he came from—‘“Saul of Tarsus.” Yes, he meant 
Tarsus—his own Tarsus. There were as many 
different cities of Tarsus as there are cities of 
Chicago. There were thieves and harlots in Tar- 
sus—Paul was not a citizen of their city. There 
were mean men in Tarsus, men who were un- 
kindly and ungodly—Paul was not a citizen of 
their city. He was a citizen of his own Tarsus, and 
that city was not mean. 

His ultimate citizenship, however, was not in 
Tarsus but in a realm of moral purpose and spirit- 
ual ideals. “Our citizenship is in heaven.” And 
that city of moral purpose and spiritual ideals to 
which he owed his final allegiance is a city which 
can be set up anywhere, at Tarsus or Ephesus, in 
Corinth or in Rome, in New York or in Shanghai. 

It is for every man to build for himself that 
city to which he gives his final allegiance. He 
frames it up out of the principles by which he 
lives, from the values upon which he sets his 
heart, from the realities to which he stands inti- 


T5 


Where Do You Liver 


mately related. And when that city is well built 
it is “no mean city,” it matters not on what spot 
of earth it may happen to stand. 

The outward setting of any man’s life is of 
small moment. When Oliver Goldsmith was so 
poor that he could scarcely get bread to put in 
his mouth he had a room below the level of the 
street. He was taunted with it on one occasion. 
Some brute said to him, “You lodge in a base- 
ment.” Instantly came the stinging retort, “Your 
soul must lodge in a basement.” 

You cannot tell where a man lodges by watch- 
ing the outside of him. The body may be born in 
the manger of a stable. It may issue forth from 
some provincial town like Tarsus. It may see the 
day when it can afford no better place of residence 
than a basement. 

What of it? The inner life may, in the hour of 
its strength, stand forth like a king in his king- 
dom. The inner life may claim and hold its citi- 
zenship in heaven. The inner life may open its 
lips and make the whole world its debtor by the 
sweetness of its song. 

The question as to what place on the map you 
hail from does not interest me. I do not care 
whether you have two rooms in your house or 
twenty, or twice that. But where do you, as a child 
of the Eternal, find yourself at home? That ques- 
tion is fundamental. 


16 


I—One’s Dominant Interest 


How splendid it is that it is always possible for 
us to move! In this outer world it may not be so. 
You may not like the city you live in or the street 
you are on or the house you occupy, yet you may 
be powerless to change it. Your whole environ- 
ment when you are at home may be distasteful 
to you, yet you are compelled to settle down and 
make the best of it. But when we come to the 
dwelling-place of that inner life, we are all pil- 
grims and sojourners as our fathers were. We can 
always move. 

It may be done right here, without dust or 
noise. You need not send out for the furniture 
van. You can do it yourself by your own choice 
and resolve. If you have an uneasy feeling that 
the world you have been living in for months, for 
years it may be, has not the breadth or depth or 
height suitable for the residence and growth of a 
soul, then move. 

Move out! Move up where you belong! Move 
into a world where the best that is in you can 
stand up straight because the ceiling is high! 
Move where you can strike out and not come at 
once into contact with some restraining wall! 
Move up where you can breathe your native air 
as a child of the Eternal. 

The world where the religious man lives is a 
large world, yet Christian life is not easy. It is 
the most difficult life there is, and the most re- 
warding. There is an upper level of spiritual privi- 


17 


Where Do You Live? 


lege which towers above the common grind as the 
Matterhorn towers above the valley of the Rhone. 
But to reach it involves a stiff climb. You can do 
it if you will. No bodily infirmity need detain you 
here. No long remove from such vantage grounds 
as are found in the Alps, the Andes and the Sierra 
need hinder you—the path of spiritual ascent is 
not far from any one of us. 

But if you would go aloft, you must go in 
marching order. Lay aside every weight. Lay 
aside the sin which doth so easily beset us. Strip 
off every evil purpose and intent, every shred of 
spite or bitterness or ill will. Then by your own 
personal faith, rope yourself in with the Guide 
and Helper of man’s life, the Lord Jesus, and 
climb! 

When once you stand on that higher level 
breathing the air you were meant to breathe and 
lifting your eyes to the heights whence cometh 
help, you can say to every man who asks your 
residence, “I live in a city that hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God.” 


18 


II 
Have We Outgrown Fear? 


ET me ask you a certain question which has 

gained an added interest at the hands of our 

modern psychology! Have we outgrown fear as a 
source of motive for right living? 

Here are two texts, one from the Old Testa- 
ment and one from the New, suggesting two pos- 
sible answers! The book of Proverbs says, “The 
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The 
first letter of John says, “Perfect love casteth out 
fear, because fear hath torment and he that fear- 
eth is not made perfect in love.’ Both of these 
ideas have their adherents—which group has the 
right of it? In the light of Scripture, of common 
sense, and of experience, what would you say? 
What place has fear in a healthy moral life? 


We find those who claim that it has no place at 
all. They insist that fear is out of date—it belongs 
with the stagecoach, the spinning wheel, and the 
tallow candle. Put them in the attic! They have 
no place in the living-room of modern society. 

It is bad for children to have the fear of pun- 
ishment before their eyes. “Spare the rod and 


1g 


Where Do You Live? 


spoil the child” is regarded as a highly immoral 
statement. It is bad for students to be subjected 
to any kind of discipline with the fear of penalty 
attached—they must be “left free to live their 
own lives.” It is bad for criminals, in prison or 
out, to be brought under constraint by the com- 
pulsion of fear—they must all be “drawn and 
held by the cords of gentleness and love.” 

You will find that mental attitude wrought out 
into a definite philosophy of life by groups of peo- 
ple who undertake to dismiss fear entirely from 
their consideration. You find it embodied in cer- 
tain economic schemes urged upon us for our 
acceptance—the fear of want and the sharp spur 
of necessity are to be eliminated. You find it in 
certain policies suggested for the control of great 
states. Who’s afraid! What is there to fear when 
once we become intelligent! Fear is for cave men, 
not for civilized people with all the appliances of 
modern science at their elbows. 

Our attention has been called recently to the 
utterance of “an eminent political economist and 
university teacher.” In the year 1912—notice the 
date—he wrote these assuring words: “To-day 
we have no fear of war, famine, pestilence, or 
failing resources. The advance of knowledge has 
safeguarded men from all those evils.” He wrote 
that bit of wisdom in 1912—I wonder what he 
thinks about it now! It turned out that there was 
some slight ground for the fear of war, famine, 

20 


II1—Have We Outgrown Fear? 


pestilence, and failing resources, even with all 
our twentieth-century knowledge and appliances. 

This complacent mood has invaded religion. 
There are many well-meaning people—I hope 
they are well-meaning—engaged in putting rubber 
tires on their consciences lest they should get a 
rude jolt from the Ten Commandments, or some 
other old-fashioned barrier in the way of happi- 
ness. They have been drawing the teeth out of 
religious conviction. They have been soaking the 
backbone of theological belief in some acid solu- 
tion to make it soft and pliable. 

What a lot of sentimental froth we have had 
from the Ella Wheeler Wilcox school of poets and 
the Pollyanna Glad-Game group of fiction writers 
and the foolish religionists who like to say, “There 
is no reality in sin, sickness, disease, or death. 
Just hold the thought that everything is lovely 
and it will be.” 

We are told in certain quarters to “seek first 
the kingdom of pleasure,” and when once we are 
enjoying ourselves clear up to the limit of our 
powers, then it will be time enough to give some 
afterthought to such somber matters as duty, obli- 
gation, self-sacrifice. But in the meantime, ‘“Who’s 
afraid?’”—there is nothing to fear in heaven 
above or on the earth beneath or in the waters 
under the earth. , 


In the second place, however, we find a grow- 
21 


Where Do You Liver 


ing number of people who have their doubts about 
that whole mood. They have looked it over front 
and back and it does not look good to them. They 
have weighed it in the balance and found it want- 
ing. The gospel of pleasure first and brass tacks 
later seems to them rather flimsy. 

We are all agreed that perfect love would cast 
out fear. Perfect love—loving God with all one’s 
heart and soul, mind and strength, leaving no 
least bit of room for any competing desire! Lov- 
ing one’s neighbor in the same thoroughgoing 
fashion that one loves himself! It represents a 
very high level of spiritual achievement. How 
many such people do you know? Speaking for 
myself, I do not know very many; and I am 
frank to say that I do not find one such in my 
own breast. If we had such angels from heaven 
controlling all the interests of human life, they 
might live without fear. 

But for all the rest of us, I wonder if fear does 
not have a very real place of honor and of use- 
fulness. For children, who after all are only can- 
didates as yet for an existence worthy to be called 
human! For grown-ups, who must “become as 
little children” if they would enter the kingdom of 
heaven! For teachers and students, for employers 
and employees, for neighbors, citizens and people 
generally! They had all best bear in mind that we 
are living in the presence of a moral order with a 
sharp edge on it. They had best bear in mind that 


22 


II—Have We Outgrown Fear? 


we shall all be required to give account in some 
form for the deeds done in the body, whether they 
be good or bad, to One who knows. And “‘the way 
of the transgressor is hard.” What men sow they 
reap, and where the seed is wild oats, the harvest 
will be something frightful. 

“Live dangerously,” Nietzsche, the German 
philosopher, was forever saying to the men of his 
day. “Live dangerously!” 

He need not have been so boisterous about it. 
We all do. We have to—there is nothing else for 
it. Life is brimful of risk from the rising of the 
sun to the going down of the same and on through 
those hours which lead up to midnight—it grows 
even riskier then. The task of living wisely and 
usefully, nobly and joyously, is compassed about 
with danger. If any man sets out to reach his own 
best estate and to make the net result of his influ- 
ence an asset rather than a liability to the com- 
munity, he will have to watch his step. 

The pace of modern life, on the Campus and 
off, is swift and the road is full of sharp turns. 
Here are perils, physical, intellectual, moral! 
Here are live wires of high voltage; here are 
poison gases deadly as they can be to all the finer 
qualities of soul; here are moral precipices the 
bottom of which no man can see! And on all sides, 
people whom you know well are being struck 
down, they are being gassed, they are being 
hurled into the pit. In the face of all the tragedy 


23 


Where Do You Live? 


of common life, any man who goes about saying, 
‘“Who’s afraid?” is either a downright fool or he 
is a rascal. 


We have had a curious blend of liberal the- 
ology, loose ethics and shallow knowledge, the 
effect of which has been the exact opposite of that 
produced by “Mocha and Java mixed.” It has 
not kept people awake, it has lulled them to sleep. 
Marshall Dawson, in his stimulating book, Nzme- 
teenth Century Evolution and After, brings out 
that fact. “Twentieth Century Biology,” he says, 
“has a morality which puts Calvinism in the 
shade”—it has a keener edge than the old Cal- 
vinism. 

“Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon on 
‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ pictured 
the impenitent suspended by a thread over a 
burning pit. Twentieth Century Biology paints a 
still more impressive picture.” It shows the physi- 
cal consequences of wrongdoing. “It points to the 
animal depths from which we have climbed up— 
and to which reversion is fearfully easy. Evolu- 
tion is a reversible process.” It is not a one-way 
street. The traffic does not all move in cone direc- 
tion—there is progress and there is also degenera- 
tion. 

In place of that slender thread to which men 
may cling and upon which they may climb, “mod- 
ern science shows us a strong, elastic band by 

24 


II—Have We Outgrown Fear? 


which man is still linked to that animal world 
from which he has struggled upward; and if he 
ceases to struggle and to strive for full spiritual 
freedom he may be snapped back into the abyss. 
Science and religion unite in saying that security 
is only for those who set their affections upon the 
things which are above.” I hope that Dayton, 
Tennessee, and all the misguided men who think 
that the doctrine of evolution destroys religion, 
will read that book. 

“The way of the transgressor is hard.” Neither 
the Revised Version nor Higher Criticism has 
made any change at that point. The Almighty has 
written that statement across the whole face of 
human life in a very plain hand. The direful con- 
sequences which he steadily visits upon the break- 
ing of his laws furnish a strong hint to bad men 
that they are off the track. This applies not only 
to the coarse sins of the flesh, drunkenness and 
licentiousness, killing and stealing—it applies 
with equal force to selfishness and greed, to moral 
indifference and spiritual sloth. The man who is 
flippant, cynical, selfish in his prevailing moods, is 
doomed by the very quality of life which those 
moods produce. He has been “snapped back” 
already into the methods of the ape, the tiger and 
the hog. All wrongdoing is dangerous—it destroys 
manhood. “Behold, therefore, the goodness and 
the severity of God”—they are the convex and 


25 


Where Do You Liver 


the concave sides of the same shield of moral 
interest in the welfare of mankind. 


Millions of people from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific went to see that moving picture called 
“The Ten Commandments.” I went too—l fol- 
lowed the crowd. To me, it was a picture, but not 
in any sense “moving.” Long before they had 
finished, I was indescribably bored. Like so many 
of the moving pictures, it became deadly dull. Any 
one who cannot sit down in the quiet of his own 
room and read the book of Exodus and picture 
all that to himself in a way ten times more im- 
pressive than anything which they have succeeded 
in getting into their poor films, is lacking in moral 
imagination. 

Here was Mt. Sinai in the desert, to those early 
Israelites the earthly residence of their deity! 
Here at the foot of the Mount was the ring fence 
of death which no man dared pass, save only their 
devoted leader and he only in obedience to a call 
from on high. There came a frightful storm. Huge 
black clouds rested upon the top of the Mount as 
if the Divine Being had come down robed in thick 
darkness. The flash of the lightning was like a 
momentary glimpse of that glory which no man 
could behold steadily and live. The roar of the 
thunder was like a superhuman Voice. The whole 
scene was to them a fresh manifestation of the 
divine. | 

26 


II—Have We Outgrown Fearr 


What the Voice said was this, “Have no other 
gods before me! Honor thy father and thy 
mother! Thou shalt not kill nor steal nor commit 
adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness nor 
covet anything that is thy neighbor’s.” Life and 
purity, truth and property, family peace and per- 
sonal reputation are sacred in God’s eyes. The 
man who tampers with them by the breaking of 
those laws does it at his peril. “Live danger- 
ously!” Mt. Sinai says, because all forms of evil 
doing are fatal to life at its best. 

It is dangerous for an individual or a nation 
or a social order to fall into the easy-going habit 
of finding its pleasure mainly “in those forms of 
satisfaction which are material, momentary, and 
trivial.” It develops a quality of life which will 
neither stand nor last. “Our God is a consuming 
fire” and when such chaff and stubble are brought 
into His presence, they are burned up. 


Here is the law of life, as definite and unyield- 
ing as the law of gravitation! “He that heareth 
these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken 
unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock.” 
The men who do otherwise are just plain fools. 

In the streets of any city you will see contrac- 
tors resolutely digging through fifty feet of dirt 
and sand, if need be, to set the foundations of 
their skyscrapers on bed rock. In those same 
streets you will also see multitudes of people 


27 


Where Do You Liver 


building their life structures and those sections of 
the social order for which they are responsible 
upon the shifting sand of moods and whims, upon 
easy-going customs and unproved assumptions. It 
is a thousand times more dangerous to live after 
that fashion than it would to set the Woolworth 
building of New York in a swamp. When the hard 
tests come—when the rains descend, the winds 
blow, and the floods beat upon that mode of life 
—it will go down. Their whole philosophy of life 
is as flimsy as a house of cards, so far as offering 
any real support goes. 


“If drunk with sight of power we loose 
Wild tongues that have not thee in awe, 
Such boastings as the Gentiles use 
Or lesser breeds without the law, 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


“Far-called, the navies melt away, 
On dune and headland sinks the fire; 
Lo! all our pomp of yesterday 
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


“The tumult and the shouting dies, 
The captains and the kings depart, 
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 
An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget!” 
28 


II1—Have We Outgrown Fearr 


In the third place, the best type of life com- 
bines a sound regard for the moral order which 
enfolds us, with a steady reach toward that sense 
of liberty which belongs to those who live by the 
spirit. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
wisdom”—it is not the whole of it, it is only “the 
beginning,” the A B C’s of that august language 
in which we are to do business with the Most 
High. But it is the place where we have to start. 
The man who would read Shakespeare, Plato and 
the Sermon on the Mount must first know his 
letters. 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis- 
dom and to depart from evil is understanding.” 
It is not the whole of understanding, for life has 
further and higher meanings than the mere avoid- 
ance of evil doing. But the man who has not sense 
enough to begin with that, will not have sense 
enough to learn the higher lessons which come 
later. 

You are here as Yale men not merely to fill 
your heads with sound knowledge—you are here 
also to have your moral natures more fully de- 
veloped and equipped for worthy action. I hope 
that no man here is so illiterate as to be unaware 
of that fact. 

“Work out your own salvation,” the apostle 
cried to those men at Philippi, “with fear and 
trembling.” It is serious business to undertake to 
put down evil under one’s feet, to walk with sure, 


29 


Where Do You Liver 


firm tread in the way of duty, to render the re- 
quired service to one’s own day and generation. 
It is a big job—work at it seven days in the week 
with all the spiritual vigor you can bring into 
play! That is good ethics; that is sound morality! 

But that was not all the apostle said to those 
men at Philippi—that was only the first half of it. 
In the same breath, before he let his voice fall, he 
added something still more significant. “Work out 
your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in 
you to will and to accomplish his good pleasure.” 
And that is religion—that is the sure pledge of 
ultimate success to every one who walks by faith. 

The man who has “‘the will to believe” coupled 
with the spirit of trust, feels his own imperfect 
confidence supported and directed by his sense of 
fellowship with the Spirit of truth, who shall guide 
our minds into all truth. The man who has the 
will to do what he believes to be the divine will, 
finds his own faltering purpose reinforced by its 
sense of agreement with the will of God. The man 
who follows the gleam with fidelity feels sure that 
he is headed straight for that light in which there 
is no darkness at all. The man of faith rejoices 
that God is working within him to crown his 
moral efforts with success. It is fellowship, co- 
operation, a concerted movement, all the way 
through, for we are co-laborers with him who is 
the Author and Finisher of these imperfect lives 
of ours. 


30 


II—Have We Outgrown Fear? 


It was the Master of all the higher values, One 
who knew what was in man, his limitations and 
his endless capacity for growth, who said to a 
dozen young men like yourselves: “I am the way” 
—walk in it; ‘‘and the truth’”—believe in it; ‘‘and 
the life”—live it! By his aid you can—and there 
is nothing higher—therefore you ought! 


31 


Eid 
The Jericho Road 


‘“ ™ CERTAIN man went down from Jerusalem 

to Jericho.” We are not told very much 
about that man—not even his name. He was just 
“a certain man” going along quietly, minding his 
own business, willing to live and let live. Why 
not! 

In all that he represents our common humanity. 
Men generally are doing just that. If we allowed 
ourselves to be guided in our thinking by the 
headlines in the newspapers, we might suppose 
that the majority of men were selling bootleg 
whiskey and robbing banks and murdering peo- 
ple. They are not of course—like that traveler on 
the Jericho road, they too are going straight along 
about their business with no thought of injuring 
anybody. 

When this man made his journey from Jeru- 
salem to Jericho he encountered three different 
types of people. In a rough way they represent 
the people we all meet. First there were the rob- 
bers, then came the Priest and the Levite, and 
then the good Samaritan. Look at them—they 
have something to say! 


32 


Il i—The Jericho Road 


First, the robbers! Every man in that group 
had a certain philosophy of life. It was this— 
‘“What’s yours is mine, I’ll take it.” They fell 
upon that traveler, stripped him of his raiment, 
wounded him, took all he had and departed, leav- 
ing him half dead. They believed in the good old 
rule, the simple plan that he should take who has 
the power and he should keep who can. They did 
not use the King James version of the scriptures. 
Their translation of the Golden Rule read like 
this—‘“‘Do the other fellow before ever he has a 
chance to do you.” What’s yours is mine—Hands 
up!—lI will take it! 


Now there are a great many different ways of 
robbing people. Differences of administration but 
the same evil purpose! Those men on the Jericho 
road did it in a knock down fight. The bank rob- 
ber does it at the point of a pistol. The sneak thief 
does it by slipping his hand into the pocket where 
you Carry your purse or your watch when you are 
not looking. The loan shark does it by taking 
advantage of the necessities of poor people and 
charging a rate of interest which is thievish. Di- 
versity of operation, yet it is all stealing! 

But all those fellows are amateurs—their 
methods are crude and clumsy. We send them to 
states prison whenever they are caught. There 
are finer ways of robbing people. The Jericho road 
is much longer than those thirty miles which 


OG 


Where Do You Liver 


stretch between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. 
It reaches clear round the globe—it goes every- 
where. 

On that road we see a great many men who do 
not look like robbers—they are well-dressed, re- 
spectable-looking people like ourselves. But they 
are making gain by exploiting the weak. They 
often pay wages which are less than equitable. 
They work their employees an unreasonable num- 
ber of hours. They maintain conditions in their 
mills and their mines which are unsanitary and 
dangerous. They are sometimes industrial slack- 
ers who do not give a fair day’s work for a fair 
day’s pay—they waste the time and the material 
for which their employers have paid and thereby 
increase the cost of the product for us all. They 
sometimes profit from lying advertisements. They 
“nile on all the traffic will bear” regardless, be- 
cause it means more profit. What do you call 
that? Are they not robbers too? 

One man of evil purpose kills another with a 
gun or a knife in five minutes. Another man kills 
people in five years with unsanitary tenements, 
with adulterated food, with unfair labor condi- 
tions. In either case it is murder in the eyes of 
Him who knows. It takes life. 

One man robs people at the point of a gun. 
Another man robs them by economic methods 
which are unsocial and unjust. In either case it is 
stealing. Several years ago a hungry tramp stole 


34 


I1I—The Jericho Road 


a ham one night from a freight car on the rail- 
road. He was caught next day with the ham under 
his arm and he was sent to prison, as he should 
have been. It is wrong to steal hams. That same 
winter a group of men, engaged in high finance, 
by manipulating the stock stole the railroad. But 
when they were caught with the railroad under 
their arms, they were not sent to prison. How 
about that? 

How about those men who profit from child 
labor, trading upon the toil of little people who 
ought to be at school or playing in the open air? 
How about those men who fatten upon the labor 
of women who are striving to make a bare living 
with their needles! How about those men who see 
to it that the farmer gets a low price for that 
which his land produces, yet when you and I 
come to consume that produce we pay a high 
price for it? The big, wide margin between goes 
mainly into the pockets of men who do not pro- 
duce anything—they trade upon what other men 
produce. How about those men who manufacture 
articles which are for sale rather than for use! 
The articles look well long enough to be sold but 
the material is poor, the workmanship worse and 
their utility slight. 

How about all those people? Would you not 
call their action robbery? I have read the Bible 
through a good many times and I am fairly 
familiar with the dictionary. I know of no other 


35 


Where Do You Liver 


word to be applied to it but “stealing.” They are 
taking what does not belong to them. What’s 
yours is mine—I’ll take it. That is their philoso- 
phy of life and a wicked philosophy it is. 


In the second place this man on the road to 
Jericho encountered the Priest and the Levite. 
Here was our common humanity lying at the 
roadside wounded and helpless! By chance there 
came along a certain priest. When he saw that 
bit of human need, he said to himself: “No affair 
of mine! I did not rob the man. Never robbed 
anybody in my life! It is his own fault—careless 
of him to have been traveling alone in this region 
where brigands lurk among the rocks!” Thus he 
excused himself from all responsibility in the 
matter and passed by on the other side. 

Then a Levite came along. He was not quite 
so brutally cold and selfish as the Priest. “He 
came and looked upon” the man. He may have 
asked his name in case the poor fellow had par- 
tially regained consciousness. He probably in- 
quired how many robbers there were and how 
much of his money they got and if he was suffer- 
ing much pain from those wounds in his head. 
Then having gotten all the statistics and having 
expressed his regret that such things were allowed 
to happen in this wicked world he too passed by 
on the other side. Those two men also had their 

36 


I1I—The Jericho Road 
philosophy of life—it was this, ‘““What’s mine is 
my own—I’ll keep it.” 

They were very respectable men no doubt, like 
ourselves. They were religious men we know. It 
was the Priest’s business to preach religion in the 
temple service just as I am doing now. It was the 
Levite’s business to sing religion in the temple 
service. The Levites made up the choir in the 
Jewish church. It is a thousand pities that the 
Priest and the Levite were not practicing their 
religion that day on the Jericho road. It would 
have immortalized them. Everybody in Christen- 
dom knows the Good Samaritan, and his action 
on that occasion has made him more popular than 
Santa Claus. But the Priest and the Levite have 
been kicked and cuffed from that day to this. 
“What’s mine is my own, I’ll keep it,” is not a 
philosophy of life which makes friends. 

Yet what a lot of it there is! The Priest and 
the Levite represent a multitude which no man 
can number, of all nations and peoples and kin- 
dreds and tongues. They stand off looking at these 
bits of human need, thoughtless, careless, selfish 
as pigs. They are always turning their faces away 
from human need and passing by on the other 
side. | 

When they see a woman left a widow with a 
bunch of little mouths to be fed, or boys and girls 
living on oatmeal and crackers in their struggle 
for an education or good causes of all sorts held 


oF 


Where Do You Liver 


back and crippled for lack of support, these self- 
centered people never turn a hair. ‘“What’s mine 
is my own! Worked hard for it! Always paid my 
own way a hundred cents on the dollar. I am not 
giving any of it away for the sake of sentiment. 
I’ll keep it.” They are stingy, forgetting appar- 
ently what Jesus said about the fate of the stingy. 


“The Levite came and looked upon” the 
wounded man—and these people are willing often- 
times to do that much. They rather enjoy looking 
at human need—they often feel that they have 
been doing their duty when they were merely look- 
ing at it or hearing about it. When they read the 
Survey regularly and listen to wise lectures on 
“scientific charity,” when they attend wonderful 
conferences on “charities and corrections” and 
hear stirring addresses by social reformers who 
are ready to reconstruct the whole social order 
overnight, when they go to see plays like “The 
Fool” and cry a little, they often think that they 
must have been making considerable moral prog- 
ress because they have felt so badly about the 
need of the world. People whose sympathies are 
not sufficiently exercised by being brought into 
contact with the painful realities of life frequently 
enjoy a little extra rubbing and moral massage. 
Then they cross over and pass by on the other 
side. 

It is frightfully easy for college students to 

38 


Il I—The Jericho Road 


become thoroughly selfish. They have so much 
done for them by those who love them, by those 
who are paid to minister to their well being and 
by those who have created splendid endowments 
for their benefit, that they sometimes feel that 
they must be the center of the whole solar system 
and that the sun, moon and stars revolve mainly 
for their enjoyment. High privileges grow around 
them so thick and fast that they overlook the 
obligations which privilege entails. “To whom 
much is given, of him will much be required!” 

What high praise was given to those early 
Christians at Jerusalem! “No man said that any 
of the things that he possessed were his own.” 
They were all held in trust. Those men were good 
stewards of the values under their control and 
they used them in the spirit of consecration to 
ends higher than personal advantage. 

Here is a five dollar bill which I happen to 
have! Is it my own to do with as I like? I did not 
steal it—I earned it in my profession. But into 
the creation of that bit of value before it came 
into the possession of Yale University to be paid 
to me for service rendered, there went the labor 
of some other man’s hand or brain. It is an ex- 
pression of life; it is stored up life. If I should 
use it for some evil purpose or in some thought- 
less piece of self-indulgence, I should be wrong- 
ing the man who helped to create that bit of value 
and I should be wronging those interests which 


39 


Where Do You Live? 


it might be made to serve. It is not my own to 
do with as I like. The Priest and the Levite were 
all astray in their philosophy of life. The world 
cannot move along with the idea that what is 
mine is my own,—I will keep it. It is the devil’s 
philosophy of life. 


In the third place, this man on the Jericho road 
had still another experience. “A certain Samaritan 
as he journeyed came where he was” and when he 
saw that bit of human need “he was moved with 
compassion.” He said to himself, “I did not rob 
the man, but the fact that I am here, sound and 
well with money in my purse, while he lies there 
helpless, creates an obligation. I am the only man 
in sight to do anything about it. It is up to me— 
it is my job.” 

He tore off strips from his flowing Oriental 
garment and bound up the man’s wounds. “He 
poured in oil and wine,” which the traveler in 
that country usually carries with him for his 
lunch. A little oil on the bandages to make them 
soft and a little wine down the man’s throat to 
revive him, for he was “half dead”! He got him 
up “and set him on his own beast.” He was will- 
ing to get off and walk for a time so that a needier 
man might ride to a place of safety. He got him to 
an inn and took care of him and saved his life. 
He too had his philosophy of life—it was this! 
‘“‘What’s mine is ours—we’ll share it.” 


40 


Il I—The Jericho Road 


“The man on horseback,” not in the sinister 
sense in which that phrase is commonly used but 
in the sense that nearly every man is mounted on 
some advantages which might be used upon occa- 
sion to serve a needier life. The Samaritan was 
mounted that day on a small Syrian donkey such 
as they use in that country. It was not much of a 
beast, but he used it to save a man’s life. 

Most of us are mounted. We may not be riding 
in a coach and six or in a Pierce Arrow limousine, 
but we have at least a Syrian donkey or a Ford 
car under us. We have money in our purses—we 
haven’t been robbed. We have homes, not all of 
them on Fifth Avenue or fronting the park, but 
places of comfort. We have intelligence, not as 
much perhaps as Solomon or President Eliot of 
Harvard, but enough to get along. We have some 
measure of goodness—nothing prancing or showy, 
but like the Samaritan’s donkey, plain, everyday 
goodness. And here we are on the Jericho road 
with human need scattered along every mile of it! 
What are we going to do about it? Are we ready 
to accept that third philosophy of life? ‘“What’s 
mine is ours, to be shared with the less fortunate.” 

Any healthy man with two hands and two feet 
can ride his donkey from Jericho clear up to the 
New Jerusalem without robbing anybody or 
wounding anybody on the road, simply riding and 
letting ride. It is as easy as rolling off a log. But 
that is not the way to inherit eternal life, Jesus 


4I 


Where Do You Live? 


said to the lawyer whose question called out this 
familiar parable. The man who rides up to the 
gate of heaven mounted on his advantages, with- 
out having used those advantages along the way 
to aid helpless people to make their way to the 
gate of heaven, will find that gate shut. It does 
not open to that sort of an approach. The very 
essence of eternal life, the whole spirit of the 
Christian religion, lies in a certain willingness to 
get down off some advantages which rightfully 
belong to us in order to set some helpless life upon 
them that he too may rise. What’s mine is ours! 


This is the doctrine Paul preached and there 
is none better. It is acceptable to the Fundamen- 
talist and also to the Modernist. William Jennings 
Bryan believed in it and Harry Emerson Fosdick 
preaches it every Sunday. It is good, sound doc- 
trine at Dayton, Tennessee, or at Princeton or in 
Boston. “Have this mind in you which was also 
in Christ Jesus. He being in the form of God 
thought it not a prize to be grasped to be on an 
equality with God. But he made himself of no 
reputation, took upon him the form of a servant 
and was made in the likeness of men. And being 
found in fashion as a man, he became obedient 
unto the death of the cross.” 

He got off and came down that he might give 
himself for us in that redemptive love and self- 
sacrifice which would bring us to the Father. 


42 


I1I—The Jericho Road 


“Wherefore God hath highly exalted him and 
hath given him a name which is above every 
name.” In that hour when “God so loved the 
world” as to give his only begotten Son, Jesus 
said, “What is mine is ours, we will share it.” 
That made him the Savior. It is that philosophy 
of life which is to save the world. 

One of our own poets puts it in the mouth of 
Christ in his “Vision of Sir Launfal.” 


“Not what we give, but what we share, 
For the gift without the giver is bare: 
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, 
Himself, his hungering neighbor and me.” 


What’s mine is ours, we'll share it! If that 
philosophy of life is carried out along the Jericho 
road and wrought into the daily round of duty, 
it will finally lift that whole region up to the style 
and manners of the New Jerusalem at its best. 


“When ye pray say, Our’—“Our Father who 
art in heaven.” That is the way to begin. No man 
can get his mouth open and utter the first two 
words of acceptable prayer until he has in his 
heart that sense of sympathy which bids him say 
“Our.” Not “my Father” nor “your Father” but 
“Our Father’’! 

And when you live, say “our.” It is the only 
way we can live aright. No man can say that any 
of the things he possesses are exclusively his own. 


43 


Where Do You Liver 
My farms, my barns, my goods, my money, my 
brains—all these are to be held in trust and to be 
used with that higher, finer sense of social obliga- 
tion which prompts a man to say “our.”’ Selfish- 
ness is sin and sin is the death of all that is best. 

There is a lovely story here in the Old Testa- 
ment. It may not be literal and exact history— 
perhaps it is only a bit of folklore. I would not 
dogmatize on that point. There was a famine in 
Syria and the people were dying right and left 
from starvation. There was a poor widow who had 
reached the end of her resources—she did not 
know where the next meal was coming from. She 
had a little meal at the bottom of her barrel and 
a little oil in a cruse. She was about to mix it up 
and bake a little cake for herself and her son and 
they would eat it; and then she supposed that 
they would die as others were dying from starva- 
tion. 

But that very day there came to her home a 
prophet of the Lord. He asked her for something 
to eat. Poor and desperate though she was she 
shared with him her last morsel of food. The 
grateful prophet stayed on in her house, and 
somehow, the story says, so long as she continued 
to share with him what she had, she continued to 
find meal in that barrel and oil in that cruse. “She 
and he and her son did eat from it many days and 
the barrel of meal wasted not neither did the 
cruse of oil fail.” 


44 


I1I—The Jericho Road 


Call it poetry or call it prose, as you like, there 
is a great truth there! So long as she said to those 
who were even more needy than herself, ““‘What’s 
mine is ours, we’ll share it,” the supplies held out. 


We have been thinking of these three philoso- 
phies of life up to this point purely in personal 
terms. Before we go, let me broaden the scope of 
their application. 

We would all agree that no strong nation has 
the right to say to a weaker nation “What’s yours 
is mine, I’ll take it.”” When any nation does that 
by military force it becomes a thief and a robber. 
Sooner or later it will learn the meaning of that 
terrible judgment uttered by the Lord. “The 
wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations 
that forget God.” We have seen that very princi- 
ple worked out in our own day. The way of selfish 
aggression is hard. 

We would all agree that no nation has the right 
to say “What’s mine is my own, I’ll keep it for 
myself.” How wonderfully, for example, this 
nation has been blessed. A position of unique ad- 
vantage between two great oceans! A magnificent 
array of wide and varied resources! A climate 
unsurpassed for active industry! A people strong, 
capable, aspiring, made up from the blending of 
the more forceful elements in many races! An 
honorable history affording inspiration to all of us 
who stand in that goodly succession! We too 


45 


Where Do You Live? 


might say what Israel said in the days of her 
glory, “What nation hath God so nigh unto them, 
as the Lord our God is unto us in all things that 
we call upon him for!” 

We have not been beaten and robbed in the 
last ten years as great sections of Europe have 
been by a disaster unspeakable. We have not suf- 
fered from the devastating influence of war as 
France and Belgium, Russia and Great Britain, 
Germany and Austria have suffered. We are not 
helpless and half-dead. The economists tell us 
that the wealth of this country at the present time 
is fifty per cent more than the wealth of Great 
Britain and France, Germany and Italy all com- 
bined. Here we are on the Jericho road, strong 
and rich, joyous and hopeful! 

What are we going to do about it? Are we 
going to stand aloof from those intricate, baffling 
problems in Europe and say, “No affair of ours! 
We did not bring on the war.” Are we going to 
say, as I heard a well-known United States Sena- 
tor, then an aspirant for the Presidency, say in 
cynical fashion yonder in Carnegie Hall, New 
York, “Let the people of this country attend 
strictly to their own business, and let Europe stew 
in her own juice’’? 

Are we going to say that? Do we dare, as chil- 
dren of Him who holds all the nations in the hol- 
low of his hand, to stand up in His presence and 
utter any such selfish, heartless, godless word! 

46 


I{I—The Jericho Road 


How could this nation whose God is the Lord 
utter such blasphemy against the divine purpose 
for all mankind! 

What then shall we say? I am not wise enough 
to stand here at the end of a sermon and hand 
out to you in half a dozen neat formulas all the 
various steps to be taken in meeting our full share 
of responsibility for the peace and good order of 
the world. I am not a statesman. But this I do 
say—where there is a will there’s a way. And 
where there is the right sort of will on the part 
of a great people, the right sort of way can be 
found. It is for the United States of America to 
say, ‘‘What is mine is ours, to be shared in that 
wider sense of international obligation.” That 
obligation we must accept and that obligation, by 
the grace of God, we must meet in full. 


47 


IV 
Equipment 


E are drawing near to the end of another 

year—some of you will soon be going out 
to face responsibilities more serious than those 
connected with attending college. The showing 
you make will depend upon what you take with 
you. I want to speak to you this morning on 
“Equipment.” 

Howard Bement of the Hill School in his little 
book says that Equipment is divided into three 
parts. It is made up of “Stamina, scholarship and 
sympathy.” Here are the same three factors listed _ 
in a letter written Nineteen Hundred years ago 
by an old man to a young man. “For God hath not 
given us the spirit of fear but of power and of 
love and of a sound mind.” 

It all comes to the same thing. Stamina is 
power, scholarship develops a sound mind and 
sympathy springs from love—love for God as the 
sum of all that is good and love for men, not be- 
cause they deserve it always but because they 
need it. Let me speak to you about these three 
prime factors in one’s equipment for life. 


48 


TV—Equipment 

First, stamina! It is a thing which every 
healthy man craves. It is a thing which every 
woman, healthy or unhealthy, adores. It has a 
physical basis, yet it is something more than mere 
bulk. You cannot always measure it off in feet and 
inches or weigh it on the scales. Forceful person- 
ality comes oftentimes done up in small packages. 
Lord Roberts of England was only five feet three 
and he did not make much of a showing on the 
scales, but he was a man of power. When he en- 
tered a room, everyone there was conscious at 
once that somebody had come. When you bump 
into a man of power, physically, intellectually or 
morally, you know at once that you are up against 
something. “Here is stamina,” you say to your- 
self. 

Now that sense of power can be cultivated and 
developed like any other live thing. It grows when 
conditions are right. It may add cubits to its 
stature in the course of four years like a tree 
planted by a river of water. Theodore Roosevelt 
became one of the most forceful men of his gen- 
eration, yet he was a puny child—in his early life 
he was never quite up to the mark physically. He 
became a man of power by making a business of 
it as soon as he was old enough to think. He may 
have had unusual capacity for growth—I think 
that he had—but his stamina, physical and intel- 
lectual, political and moral, came by his insistent 
use of the right means. He did not try to live by 


49 


Where Do You Liver 


bread and games alone—he lived by ali the great 
words which proceed out of the mind of God, 
food, clothing, shelter, exercise, naturally, also 
faith, hope, love, courage, aspiration, high re- 
solve! By these men live and grow in power. 


The man of stamina as a rule forms the habit 
of concentration early in life. He does not scatter 
his energies all over the lot. He focuses his 
efforts in such a way that wherever he is, he is 
all there. When he puts his foot down or his mind 
you feel the man’s whole weight. When he walks 
down street, he is alert and alive from his hat 
clear down to the sidewalk. When he reads a 
book his mind is intent upon taking all that the 
book has for him. When he is present at a service 
of worship, his faculties are steadily claiming 
from it all the meaning and help to be had. It is 
easier naturally to lounge and dawdle through all 
of these exercises, but no one ever thinks of look- 
ing for stamina in loungers. 

There never was a weak life which could not be 
strengthened indefinitely by this habit of concen- 
tration. Find me a man who says, “This one thing 
I do” and the chances are nine to one that he is 
doing it right up to the handle and gaining added 
efficiency for doing the next thing well. Find a 
man who says, “One thing I know” and the 
chances are that when he talks about that one 
thing he will speak as having authority. Find a 


50 


IV—Equipment 

man who says, “One thing have I desired of the 
Lord, that will I seek after,” and you may be sure 
that presently he will be bringing it in. Let any 
man form the habit of living in that direct and 
definite manner, with a clear-cut purpose domi- 
nating his action, and he will be storing up in his 
own personality that sense of power which we 
call stamina. 

I am urging the importance of all this because 
in the last analysis achievement is largely a ques- 
tion of stamina. Can Smith stand up to his job as 
a lawyer or a doctor, as an engineer or a jour- 
nalist, as a teacher or a preacher, as long as any 
other man on the street and then just a bit longer 
for the extra effort needed to give him a certain 
distinction? —The Duke of Wellington, who won 
the day at Waterloo, used to say that British sol- 
diers were no braver than French soldiers but 
they were brave five minutes longer—and that 
meant victory. ‘Five minutes longer’”’—how often 
that tells the story! 

It is a quality which cannot be purchased at 
the drugstore for so much a bottle. It cannot be 
gained in any correspondence course offered at 
Scranton, Pennsylvania. It is not a windfall which 
some lucky man picks up in the street. Stamina 
comes only as men live clean lives, eat good food, 
enough but not too much of it, drink that which 
slakes rather than creates thirst, breathe their full 
share of the outdoor air of which there is enough 


51 


Where Do You Liver 


for everybody, sleep a sufficient number of hours, 
some of them before midnight, and exercise their 
abilities in some useful employ. That is the route 
by which stamina arrives. It comes not by magic 
but by right method. And it is a part of every 
man’s job to gain his full share of it because it 
lies at the basis of so much that is best. 


In the second place, the sound mind, which is 
one of the marks of scholarship! The sound mind 
rings true every time—it is not cracked. It does 
not go to pieces in the face of difficulty—it holds 
together and overcomes obstacles. It knows al- 
ways what it is talking about and does not pour 
out an endless stream of idle words. It has a keen 
sense of fact and real capacity for drawing con- 
clusions from those facts which will be found 
valid. What a splendid asset for any life! Well 
might the apostle of old regard “the sound mind” 
as one of the gifts of the good God! 

It is a much better asset in every way than the 
thing which some people call “genius.” A bad case 
of “genius” in early life is almost as fatal as 
smallpox. There is such a thing. There are men— 
a few of them in each generation—who have ex- 
ceptional ability. They are four leaf clovers. But 
the cows are fed and the field is kept green by the 
presence in abundance of three leaf clover. The 
main part of the world’s work is being done these 
days by men of average build who have been well 


52 


IV—Equipment 

trained. Even the men of unmistakable genius 
usually attribute their success to intelligent and 
persistent effort. Agassiz used to say to the men 
at Harvard, “I seem to have formed the habit of 
observing more closely perhaps than did some of 
my associates.” 

“Knowledge is power,” not in the sense of hav- 
ing a lot of undigested information stored up in 
one’s head, like all those facts in the Britannica. 
Knowledge is power only when it becomes the 
natural furnishing of a sound mind bent upon use- 
ful achievement. 

Here is the test! Can the man think clearly 
and when he thinks produce something with the 
look and taste of his own mind upon it? Can he 
see five things at once, sharply distinguishing each 
one from the others and then organize them into 
their proper relations? Can he speak by tongue 
or by pen and actually say something? The sound 
mind means always insight, discrimination, pro- 
ductiveness. 

Now that fine quality like all the others can 
be cultivated and developed. It grows by the right 
use of right means. It sometimes adds cubits to 
its stature in less than a year. Let any man form 
the habit of seeing straight, of stating accurately 
what he sees, not some loose approximation of it, 
of forming judgments in a way that is not silly 
nor far fetched but just and reasonable! Let him 
do that and keep on doing it day in and day out, 


53 


Where Do You Liver 


week in and week out, just as he keeps on going 
to bed at night and getting up again the next 
morning—and he will be headed for a sound mind 
as surely as the needle points to the pole. 


“Then only the Master shall praise us, and only 

the Master shall blame; 

And no one shall work for money, and no one 
shall work for fame; 

But each for the joy of the working, and each, 
in his separate star, 

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God 
of Things as They Are.” 


It takes brains in these days to be good in the 
sense of being good for something. It is not 
enough to be kind-hearted and to mean well. The 
ignorant, untrained man, even where he is earnest 
and honest, may be a positive menace to society. 
He may be like that hero of Galsworthy’s who 
was riding madly ahead on a dark night with his 
face toward the tail of his galloping horse. He is 
almost sure to ride somebody down before morn- 
ing and to bring up himself in the ditch. 

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart” in the desires you cherish “and with all 
thy mind” in the thoughts you think. Jesus made 
that duty of thinking straight a part of the first 
and great commandment. You are here to learn 
the joy of intellectual fellowship with your Maker 


54 


IV—Equipment 

by thinking his thoughts after him and by keep- 
ing step with him in His wise purposes for the 
race. In this intricate social order of ours the 
sound mind is imperative, if you are to gain the 
best that life has for you, if you are to make your 
just contribution to the common welfare, and if 
you are to stand right with Him in the Day of 
Judgment. 


In the third place, sympathy, the power to feel 
for others! Wherever men live with the Lord 
through worship and obedience, the Lord gives 
them “the spirit of love,” and love is the essence 
of character. “Love works no ill to his neighbor, 
therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” He that 
loves has passed from death unto life. He is born 
of God. He that dwells in love as the abiding prin- 
ciple of his life, dwells in God and God in him, 
for God is love. 

This prevailing mood in any man’s heart deter- 
mines the reaction he gets from the social order 
which enfolds him. With the same measure he 
metes it out, it will be measured back to him 
again. In a western city a physician once told me 
this story of two lives which had come under his 
own eye. Two men lived on the same street; they 
were engaged in the same line of business; they 
were about the same age. Heredity and environ- 
ment, so far as one could see, had dealt them 
hands of about equal value. The result of the 


55 


Where Do You Live? 


game turned upon the way each man played his 
hand. 

One of the two men was sour, unbelieving, cyni- 
cal. He was always on the off side, always looking 
for knots in the log, always knocking something. 
When anyone said to him “Good morning,” he 
would reply, “What is it good for!” Unless the 
weather was perfect and everything had been 
going his way, he felt that it was not good for 
much. 

The other man faced the world with a smile 
which did not come off in the wash even when 
the water was hard. When anyone said, “Good 
morning” to him, he would often reply, “It is good 
enough for anybody.” Only a straw but it showed 
which way the wind blew! 

“And it came to pass,” this physician said, 
“that the first man died at the age of fifty from 
a complication of diseases,’ chronic dyspepsia, 
pernicious anaemia and several other complaints 
whose names I can neither remember nor pro- 
nounce. The other man lived to be eighty-six, 
active, radiant, useful to the last. He fell asleep 
with a smile on his face which had not faded out 
when his friends came to lay flowers on his casket. 
“There was a reason,” a very good reason. You 
can die without sympathy any time—here and 
now if you like! No man can live without sym- 
pathy; and sympathy means love for God and for 
one’s fellows. 

56 


IV—Equipment | 

This fine quality also, like any other live thing, 
can be cultivated and developed. No man ever has 
character of the finer sort thrust upon him. No 
man ever achieves character at a bound. It comes 
first the blade, then the ear, and then away late 
in the fall, the full, ripe corn. Where a man main- 
tains the sense of fellowship and codperation with 
those unseen, spiritual verities which are eternal, 
his character develops steadily into the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ. 

“T live,” the apostle cried in one of his highest 
moods, “I live, yet not I,” as a separate detached 
bit of the common humanity, “Christ liveth in 
me.” Christ the hope of glory; Christ the strength 
of each man’s inner life; Christ who is able to 
make us at last like him! ‘‘For me to live,” the 
apostle said, “is Christ.” “I venerate the man 
whose heart is warm, whose hands are clean, 
whose teaching and whose life coincident, exhibit 
lucid proof that he is honest in the sacred cause.” 


Here as everywhere the man of method has the 
wind and the tide with him. Some light-hearted, 
light-headed people seem to think that when we 
enter the realm of spiritual values we enter a 
region of magic and hocus pocus. They know that 
in Mathematics two and two make four every 
time, but they think that in morals two and two 
will make five or even fifty with a little judicious 
coaxing and a few fervent gestures. They have an 


57 


Where Do You Live? 


idea that a young fellow may ignore moral values 
for years, wallowing in the mire of evil indul- 
gence, and then by some sudden spasm of feeling 
become instantly as fine and as true as if he had 
never spent those years in the far country. 

I have no idea where they got that notion. It 
is not here in the Bible—this book is filled with 
sound sense. I have traveled in many lands from 
east to west and from west to east and I have 
never seen a place where men did not reap as they 
sowed. I have rubbed against all sorts and con- 
ditions of men and they all said that the debits 
and credits for right living and for wrong living 
are as definite and exact as the trial balance of a 
good bank. The law of compensation does not 
fail at the top. 

The impulses we cherish soon become habits; 
habits speedily harden into character; and char- 
acter determines destiny. Two and two make four 
all the way up and all the way down. As a man 
thinketh in his heart, so he becomes—not in an 
hour nor in a week, but ere long. And the only 
heart which is safe here or hereafter is a heart 
possessed by love for God and love for one’s 
fellow beings. 

Howard Bement was right—equipment for the 
serious business of living means stamina, scholar- 
ship, sympathy. It means power, love and a sound 
mind. These qualities are not electives—they are 
required. Any man who lacks these requisites will 

58 


IT V—Equipment 
be weighed in the balance and found wanting. 


He is “not all there” and the world will not be 
long in telling him so. 


Why not do something definite and practical 
about it here and now? So many good impulses 
are wasted because they do not find expression in 
concrete form. The good impression comes to its 
proper fruitage only as it utters itself in whole- 
some action. 

When you go back to your room sit down and 
write out a promissory note. Date it, June 1, 1926. 
The very dating of it will make you think, 1926— 
it is just that long since One was born in Bethle- 
hem of Judea, whose mighty aid we need! 

Let the note read like this; ‘Six months after 
date I promise to pay to myself a sounder and a 
more reliable physique, a better trained and a 
better stored mind, a kindlier and a more sympa- 
thetic heart, than I now possess.” Sign it, seal it 
and deliver it to yourself as an obligation which 
you have assumed. 

Then having given your note, make that obli- 
gation as good as a Liberty bond. Set yourself to 
the task of meeting it when it falls due. You can 
if you will. By right thinking and by right action, 
by cherishing the spirit of good will toward others 
and the spirit of obedient trust toward God, you 
can go straight along making those deposits in the 
bank of your own inner life which will enable you 


59 


Where Do You Liver 


at the end of the six months to pay that debt in 
full. 

When the time comes you will stand up before 
the glass and before your Maker, offering your- 
self and offering Him a sounder body, a clearer 
mind and a kinder heart. “For God hath not given 
us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love and 
of a sound mind’”—by these men enter into life 
to go no more out! 


60 


V 
The Challenge of the Unattained 


HE sorriest figure about town is the man 

who has caught up with his ideals. He has 
arrived, as he thinks, and that is the tragedy of 
it. His present achievements, meager though they 
may be, are saying to him, “This is where you 
get off—you are not going any farther.” 

It is a thousand times better to live in a hut 
looking up at the castle with wonder and longing, 
wishing one might live there, than it is to live in 
the castle itself and have nothing to look up to. 
One is life, the other is death. Every man needs 
the steady challenge of something unattained. 

You are all familiar with the scene where these 
words stand, ‘“Thou shalt not go over, but I have 
caused thee to see it!” The figure at the center 
of that scene was that of an old man with long 
white hair and beard like Michael Angelo’s statue 
of him in Rome. He was standing on Mt. Nebo 
looking out across the Jordan Valley into Pales- 
tine. 

He had spent forty of the best years of his life 
in an effort to bring those Israelites out of the 
bondage of Egypt into that place of freedom and 

61 


Where Do You Live? 


opportunity. He had hoped to enter that land him- 
self at the head of a marching host. Yet here he 
was in the desert of Moab, realizing that after all 
he was not to set foot in the land of promise. He 
would die in the desert. And the last words he 
heard before he died were these, “Thou shalt not 
go over, but I have caused thee to see it.” He had 
spent his whole life in the pursuit of an unattained 
ideal. 


Notice three great truths suggested by that 
scene! First, his real life began with a social 
vision! When the awakening came he was a shep- 
herd in the land of Midian. He was watching his 
sheep on the slopes of Mount Horeb when he saw 
a bush burn with a mysterious fire. He heard a 
voice from that bush which said: “Put off thy 
shoes! The place where thou standest is holy 
ground! I am the God of thy fathers, the God of 
Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.” He was face 
to face with his Maker. 

Then the voice added: “I have seen the afilic- 
tion of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard 
their cry by reason of their task masters. I know 
their sorrows. I am come down to deliver them. 
Come now, I will send thee unto Pharaoh that 
thou mayst bring them out.” He was called into 
the service of God primarily by an appeal to his 
social sympathies. “It was from that hour of 
vision Moses dated all the heroisms of his life.” 

62 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


Here were thousands of people who were being 
unfairly used! They were being exploited by 
those who ground them up for their own pleasure 
and profit. They were losing all sense of joy and 
pride in life. “They hearkened not to the voice 
of aspiration,” the record said, “for anguish of 
spirit and for cruel bondage.” It was high time 
that something was done about it. They thought 
so; the Lord thought so; and he laid it upon the 
heart of this educated young man, for “Moses 
was learned in all the learning of the Egyptians,” 
to do something about it. Social conditions are 
not fixed and final like the law of gravitation. 
Men made them—men can unmake them and 
make them better. It is just a question of having 
groups of resolute men and women here and there 
determined that social wrongs shall be righted. 


When Moses undertook the social betterment 
of his people, he found it a long, hard row to 
travel. He had to fight Pharaoh, the representa- 
tive of reaction, the stand pat, burdensome, ex- 
ploiting element in the situation. He had to brace 
up the Israelites themselves for the hard task of 
gaining their liberty—they were constantly flat- 
tening out and allowing their wills to go lame 
when obstacles arose. He had to lead them 
through a desert of dreary sand and bitter waters 
—the provisioning of that host and keeping them 

63 


Where Do You Liver 


on the march was a job for a Napoleon. He lived 
day in and day out under the steady challenge of 
difficulty. | 

He was held up to it by his sense of the Un- 
seen. He endured as seeing One who is invisible. 
Man does not live by bread and meat alone. He 
does not live by the plain, hard facts of everyday 
life alone. He lives by all the words which proceed 
out of the mind of God. He lives by those forces 
and values outlined in his sky in some hour of 
vision. He lives by the hope of moral advance, of 
social betterment, of service rendered to certain 
vital interests in the community where he is set 
down. He lives by all those finer impulses which 
have to do with the reign of righteousness and 
peace and good will among men. 

“Other men have,” he says to himself, “and 
other men can. I will! I will cause my life to 
stand up and be counted for the coming of the 
kingdom of God on earth.” The Lord has caused 
him to see it with his eyes and he goes forth to 
live by the power of an unattained ideal shining 
in his sky like a fixed star. 


In the second place, this man spent forty of 
the best years of his life in the pursuit of that 
ideal. His life was not one grand, sweet song, like 
some fancy little story from the Saturday Evening 
Post or the movies. He had never been to Holly- 


64 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


wood. He did not begin on the lowest round of 
the ladder and then make a bee line to the top. 
That sort of thing is confined mainly to theatrical 
performances. 

He marched and countermarched, gaining 
ground one month and then falling back the next, 
because the people were fickle and uncertain. He 
sometimes found himself within striking distance 
of the goal and then was swept back by forces 
which were too strong for him. But rain or shine, 
uphill and downhill, through thick and through 
thin, he kept at it because he was a man with a 
purpose. He had the spirit of that business man’s 
motto, “Consider the postage stamp and be wise! 
Its usefulness depends upon its ability to stick 
until it gets there.” 

You have all read the account of the sailing of 
the Pilgrims from Holland. They believed in a 
church without a bishop and a state without a 
king. They were about to take ship for an un- 
known shore to realize that dream. They gathered 
in their little church at Delft Haven to listen to a 
sermon by their pastor, John Robinson. He was a 
man “who always marched breast forward,” be- 
lieving that God still had much more light to fall 
from his holy word. He always greeted the Un- 
seen with a cheer. He preached to them that 
morning from this text: “Get thee out of thy land 
and from thy kindred unto a land that I will 
show thee. I will bless thee and thou shall be a 

65 


Where Do You Live? 


blessing. I will make of thee a great nation and in 
thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” 

The Pilgrims crossed the ocean with that Mes- 
sianic promise ringing in their ears. They landed 
on the twenty-first day of December at one of the 
bleakest spots on the Atlantic coast. They battled 
through that long winter fighting against famine 
and disease, against hostile Indians and the New 
England climate. Before spring came many of 
them were under the sod. But through it all they 
were sustained by the vision of something unat- 
tained. “I will make of thee a great nation and in 
thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” 
They too would make of themselves a Messianic 
people. 

The man who reads history knows what hap- 
pened yesterday and the day before. The man 
who reads the newspapers knows what is happen- 
ing today—that is, he knows something about it, 
for fact and fancy, accuracy and inaccuracy min- 
gle together on the pages of the daily press in a 
way that would baffle all the higher critics on 
earth. The man of vision knows what will happen 
tomorrow and the day after and the third day by 
the invincible march of the divine purpose which 
he is set to serve. 

He is the man who counts. The past is beyond 
our control—all it can furnish us is a lesson. The 
present is raw material out of which something 
can be made if we know how and have the will to 

66 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


do it. The future offers us opportunity unmeas- 
ured. 


Here is just one act in the great drama! The 
nineteenth century was preéminently the age of 
the atom and the molecule. It witnessed a greater 
advance in physical science and in the control of 
the material forces than all the preceding cen- 
turies put together had witnessed. The Twentieth 
Century is young yet—it is only a child. It has 
scarcely learned to walk or to talk. But it bids 
fair to be the age of the mind and the soul. 

In that wider and wiser use of mental and 
spiritual forces for the gaining and maintenance 
of sound health; in the more accurate measure- 
ment of that mysterious form of energy known as 
“the will’; in the better methods for using the 
power of personality to lift the race to higher 
levels of thought, feeling and action; in the devis- 
ing of better systems of nurture and education, 
which will not leave whole areas of human nature 
untouched, we can see the finger of God pointing 
inward, onward and upward. The final forces in 
human society are the spiritual forces—they 
decide the issue when the returns are all in; and 
God is causing us to see it with our eyes. 

I am fully aware that some men who live 
mainly from their necks down, pour contempt 
upon all this. They say, as that cynical, skeptical 
old chap who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes said 

67 


Where Do You Live? 


twenty-five hundred years ago (they too are just 
about that far behind the times): “all things 
come alike to all, to the righteous and to the 
wicked, to him that sacrificeth and to him that 
sacrificeth not. All go to one place, for all return 
to dust, so that a man has no preéminence above 
a beast. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” Noth- 
ing is worth while! Matter and force are the final 
lords of life. Heredity and environment have us 
bound hand and foot. There is no such thing as 
freedom or the power to choose, or the spirit of 
initiative! They are materialists and pessimists of 
the 33d and last degree. 

Do you want to know what becomes of pessi- 
mists? It is all here in the Book. Twelve men were 
sent up from that desert of Moab to spy out the 
land of promise. Ten of them were pessimists. 
“It is a good land,” they said when they came 
back, “a land that flows with milk and honey, 
but the cities are walled up to heaven and the 
people are giants. We were like grasshoppers in 
their sight. We cannot overcome it.” And they 
urged the Israelites to go back to the fleshpots of 
Egypt and to die under the heel of that material 
bondage. 

Then read on! “And all those men who brought 
an evil report of the land, died by the plague, 
but Caleb and Joshua lived.” Caleb and Joshua, 
the men of vision, the two men out of the twelve 
who believed that the thing could be done, lived! 

68 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


The pessimists died in the desert of Moab, as 
they always do, but the men of vision and of pur- 
pose lived on. “If the Lord delight in us,” they 
said, “he will give us the land.” 


In the third place, here was one man who had 
lived in the service of a great ideal, yet he died 
without having attained. “I have caused thee to 
see it, but thou shalt not go over.” 

Here he was on the last lap of his long journey! 
His mind went back through the years of struggle. 
He saw himself again a handsome young fellow 
with a life of luxury within easy reach as the 
adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter but refusing 
it because of his sympathy for the struggling peo- 
ple. He saw himself again a shepherd watching a 
bush burn with a mysterious fire and hearing a 
voice which spoke of social obligation, until he 
turned aside from a life of security and ease to 
one of hardship and danger. He saw himself again 
facing Pharaoh on the banks of the Nile and call- 
ing upon him to let the oppressed people go, when 
he knew it might cost him his head. He saw him- 
selt hated and reviled by the thoughtless Israelites 
whom he was striving to serve, because they were 
blind and unbelieving. He saw it all—the long, 
hard years of struggle, yet here he was doomed to 
die in the desert! “Thou shalt not go over.” 

But he was still looking ahead from his moun- 
tain top of vision over into the land of promise. 


69 


Where Do You Liver 


There it was as real as life! There was the Jordan 
Valley with its green fields and waving palm 
trees! There were the mountains round about the 
site of Jerusalem even as the Lord is round about 
his people! There was Hebron to the south where 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried as a kind 
of pledge that their descendants would inherit the 
land! There were Ebal and Gerizim to the north, 
twin peaks rising up into a natural amphitheatre 
for the enacting of a great spiritual drama! 

There it was, a veritable land of promise! It 
was no will-o’-the-wisp, no empty dream, which 
he had been pursuing all those years. It was all 
there! He might die in the desert without ever 
setting foot in it, but other men would follow the 
trail he had blazed and enter into the joy of their 
Lord. He had seen it with his eyes. 


Some of you are disturbed at times by visions 
of that which has never been yours. You want a 
more complete physical efficiency, not for self- 
indulgence, but for the better service of those 
interests which you count supreme. You want a 
more complete mental unfolding, for you feel 
stirring within you the capacity for high and seri- 
ous thought. You want a more perfect companion- 
ship with those who know you for what you are in 
a finer congeniality of taste and interest. You 
want a soul, truer, cleaner, kindlier than this 
troubled soul of yours which comes up weary and 


70 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


travel-stained from the rough contacts of the 
week. You hold all that before your mind’s eye 
and say, ‘““That is what I wanted to be and to do.” 
Then you contrast it with your actual achieve- 
ments and you are filled with disappointment. 

But thank God that you have seen it and 
wanted it! It is not what a man has done which 
marks him up or down on the books God keeps. 
It is what he has wanted to do and has tried to 
do, even though he failed. Die in the desert if you 
must, but hold the vision of something beyond 
and strive for it. 

On every college campus there is always a cer- 
tain percentage of young people who never 
amount to anything, chiefly because they have 
always had pretty much everything they wanted 
brought to them on a silver tray. Life is not the 
ability to sit down and order what you want and 
have somebody bring it to you. Life is wanting 
something desperately and going out after it your- 
self and feeling anxious about it and finally bring- 
ing it in. If every young chap had to live for a 
year or two on ten dollars a week and earn it 
himself, it would transform a lot of lazy parasites 
into useful members of the social order. 


Here we are, men and women, citizens of the 
Republic, holding fast our faith that government 
of the people, by the people, for the people, is the 

71 


Where Do You Live? 


finest form of political organization on earth. 
What a magnificent ideal! Then look at the politi- 
cal life of two-thirds of our American cities! How 
are they governed? How far has society shown 
itself able to select and place in power those best 
men, best in personal character, best in judgment, 
best in civic efficiency, whose right it is to rule! 
How far are “the powers that be” ordained of 
God to the high ends of order and justice, to the 
high ends of honesty, economy and efficiency! 
The very asking of such a question in many an 
American city would sound grotesque. We are 
still in the desert of Moab. 

Here we are participants in an economic sys- 
tem, buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, 
employers and employees! What a high and holy 
task to be set to furnish food and fuel, clothing 
and shelter, education and recreation to meet the 
needs of those created in the likeness and image 
of God! We are purveyors to the children of the 
king. We are here to make business a social util- 
ity, a means of bringing together the resources of 
earth and the needs of society. We are here to 
make the commerce of the world a noble section 
of the spiritual life of the race and not the selfish 
squabble of hungry animals for the best bones. 
The spirit of greed, the habit of exploiting others, 
the readiness of the strong to profit by the weak- 
ness of the less fortunate, should have no more 
place in this sacred process of ministering to the 


72 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


necessities of the race than it would have at the 
altars of religion—it would be economic blas- 
phemy. Then look at the workaday world as it 
really is! Alas, we are away out in the desert of 
Moab! 

Here we are in the presence of an educational 
system stretching from the kindergarten to the 
university! It is there to offer opportunity for an 
older and wiser generation to bring out of its 
treasures things new and old, the best it has seen 
and felt, the best it has thought and known, for 
the development and maturing of moral person- 
ality in all these younger candidates for human 
existence. 

What a high and holy thing education is when 
it is construed in terms of life! We think of 
schools where all the students are eager and as- 
piring, none of them listless and cynical. We think 
of schools where all the teachers are competent 
and interesting—I do not say entertaining, for 
any clown or clever story teller can be that—com- 
petent and interesting in their power to enlist the 
interest of others in the subjects they are set to 
teach. 

Then look at the moods and the methods which 
prevail in great sections of our educational sys- 
tem! Look at the disappointing output of the sys- 
tem as measured in terms of the moral values! 
Charles W. Eliot of Harvard said once: “The 
failure of our public schools to turn out good citi- 


73 


Where Do You Live? 


zens is conspicuous. We shall have to look it 
squarely in the face.” 

The coming of the Great War in Central Eu- 
rope caused those people who lightly believed 
that science and secular education quite divorced 
from religion would usher in the millennium to 
hang their heads. They thought, as someone has 
suggested, that “it is the Laboratory rather than 
the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the 
world.” But their scheme did not work—it never 
will because the task is too great for it. “The 
Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is 
the only form of energy in heaven above or on 
the earth beneath qualified to undertake the spir- 
itual renewal of mankind. 

Science is not enough. It was the most scientific 
and the most highly educated nation on earth 
which led off in the greatest single disaster the 
world has ever suffered. We saw the frightful in- 
adequacy of our present educational methods 
there revealed like a jagged flash of lightning 
across the sky. We are still away back in the 
deserts of Moab! 


But thank God we have seen it all, as no other 
generation ever has! We have not gone over. We 
have not been able to put it across. We know full 
well the limitations of our present political, indus- 
trial and educational methods. 

We have gained, however, a vision of what this 


74 


V—Challenge of the Unattained 


highly organized life dominated by intelligence, 
conscience and the love of God could be made 
to mean in its ministry to human well-being. Fail- 
ure has not made us indifferent—it has only 
served to stimulate us to more resolute action. 
This wandering in the desert of Moab is prepara- 
tory to something better. We are sowing that 
others may reap. We are laying foundations which 
scarcely show above the ground as yet, on which 
others will build the city of God. We may or we 
may not enter in ourselves, but we are determined 
to live in the vision and. service of a great ideal. 


75 


Vi 
The Failures of Success 


‘© CERTAIN rich man said to himself, “Thou 

hast goods laid up for many years. Take 
thine ease! Eat, drink and be merry.’ But God 
said to him, “Thou fool.’ ”’ 

It seemed like a hard thing to say! No man 
likes to be called a fool—it cuts to the quick. And 
this man’s friends regarded him as anything but 
a fool. He was an active, successful business man. 
He had been making money right and left. His 
fellow townsmen “pointed with pride” to his 
achievements. They urged their sons, no doubt, 
to emulate the example of one who had “put it 
across.” 

He was a rich man and he does not seem to 
have been a bad man. No vices or crimes are laid 
at his door. There is no hint that he had gotten a 
penny of his money dishonestly. He did not 
understand life—that was all. He was altogether 
astray in his sense of values. He thought that a 
man’s life consists in the abundance of the things 
that he owns. Any man who thinks that is defec- 
tive. So the Lord looked him over east side, west 

76 


V I—tThe Failures of Success 


side, all around the block, outside and inside, and 
told him frankly that he was a fool. 


Notice the nature of this man’s folly—it was 
divided into three parts, like all Gaul in ancient 
times! He measured life in terms of material ac- 
cumulation. He was intent on making “his pile,” 
as we say, and when he had finished, that was all 
it was, a pile of things. 

He built barns and filled them with things. 
Then he built bigger barns and filled them with 
more things. When his buildings were all filled to 
the eaves, he said to himself, “Take thine ease! 
Eat, drink, enjoy yourself! You have things 
enough laid up to last you a thousand years.” 
Any man who treats life in that fashion is a down- 
right fool. 

I hardly ever walk down Fifth Avenue, New 
York, looking into the store windows, without 
saying to myself, “How many things there are in 
the world which I do not want.” All my life I 
have been what Fifth Avenue would call a poor 
man, yet I cannot think of a single thing that I 
really need that I haven’t got. The list of things 
which I do not own would fill the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, but I have all I need for growth, for 
usefulness, for happiness. What more need any- 
one ask! Yet I see hundreds of thousands of peo- 
ple working their heads off and worrying their 


77 


Where Do You Live? 


hearts out to increase their holdings of things 
which they do not need. 

This man lived altogether in the first person 
singular—that was as far as he had gotten in his 
grammar. “My barns,” “my goods,” my chance 
to have a good time! He had never learned to say 
‘Cour.’ 

Our world—for all these resources were placed 
here at the call of energy and intelligence for the 
general welfare of mankind! Our life—all hands 
are meant to share in its advance! Our Father, 
yours, mine, everybody’s, for we are all children 
of the Most High. “When ye pray, say, Our!” 
When you live say “Our!” No man has learned 
to live until he has social sympathy and a sense 
of responsibility for the welfare of others. 

When this man saw his wealth piling up he said, 
“What shall I do? I have no room to bestow all 
my goods.” 

No room, with all the hunger there was waiting 
to be fed! No room, with all those struggling peo- 
ple in the slums of our cities! No room, with all 
those promising boys and girls needing a friendly 
lift to get an education! No room, with all those 
good causes which spell civilization held back for 
lack of support! The Master was right—he was 
a thoughtless, heartless fool. 


The man also forgot that he had only a life — 
estate in all those things. He said to himself, 
78 


ViI—tThe Failures of Success 


“Take thine ease, thou hast goods laid up for 
many years.” But God said to him, “This night 
thy soul shall be required of thee—then whose 
shall those things be?” 

Not his—he could not take a penny of his 
wealth with him! And his wealth would be a 
doubtful legacy for his children if he had not 
given them any better social vision or any firmer 
hold of reality than he showed. It was only a life 
estate at best and a single turn of the wheel made 
short shrift of his fancied security. He said, 
“many years,” but the march of events said, “this 
night” will end it. 

The hour comes swiftly—it is not far away for 
any of us—when the one question before the 
house will be not, ““How much have I,” but “What 
am 1?” How much peace and worth is there in my 
personal make-up? How many other lives have 
been enriched by my influence? How far has the 
kingdom of God on earth been advanced by my 
efforts? These straight questions will take prece- 
dence over all others. The barns and the banks 
full of things will be like the toys which a child 
discards when he gains his maturity. 

The man held all these things in trust, but his 
heart had never been attuned to the wave lengths 
of feeling which were being broadcast from all 
those struggling lives awaiting some friendly 
action. The air was filled with radio messages of 
appeal, but this selfish worldling never heard any 


79 


Where Do You Live? 


of them. He lived to eat and drink and have a 
good time—now in one short, dark night his 
chance to do what he might have done so gener- 
ously was gone. He found himself at daybreak 
stripped of his possessions and shivering upon the 
brink of an eternal world for which he felt himself 
totally unfit. He had been rich in barns, but for 
all that he was a fool. 


The man also left God out of the account. Here 
he stood with paper and pencil figuring up his 
assets. So many barns and so many things in each 
one! So many stocks and bonds and other securi- 
ties! He set them down in long columns of figures, 
like a man making his return for the income tax. 
He owned all that and he called that success. He 
called it “Success” with a capital “S,” the biggest 
capital S in the whole font of type. 

But God, the Author and Giver of every good 
gift, God, the Helper and Finisher of these incom- 
plete lives of ours, was not in all his thoughts. 
“His ground brought forth plentifully,” and his 
eyes were altogether on the “ground”—he had 
never learned to look up or to claim his kinship 
with the Most High. 

What a tragedy to leave out that which is the 
crown and glory of human existence! In one of his 
stories Victor Hugo describes the laughter of a 
soul at itself. The man had decided to live a care- 
less, godless life. When he had gained a generous 

80 


VI—tThe Failures of Success 


measure of outward success, he looked one day 
in the glass and saw nothing there but a shrewd, 
selfish animal. Then he heard his own soul laugh- 
ing in derision at what he called “success.” It was 
a bitter, mocking laugh like the laughter of devils 
over the moral ruin they had brought about. “So 
is every one,” Jesus said, “who is not rich toward 
God” when night comes. 

Life is no mere pile of things. Life is friend- 
ship! Friendship with the men around us, with 
men less fortunate whom we can help, with men 
above us whom it is a high privilege to know! Life 
is friendship with him who can renew, transform 
and enrich these lives of ours! And that is exactly 
what religion is, for religion is just life at its best; 
and life at its best cannot be lived without the 
sense of fellowship with him who looks into our 
eyes and says, “I call you friends.” 

This man in the story was a fool in that he 
measured life in terms of material accumulation. 
He forgot that he had only a life estate at best. 
He was not the friend of God, for he left God out 
of the account. 


If that mode of life is folly, what is wisdom? 
“Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the 
place of understanding? It cannot be gotten for 
gold nor weighed out for silver. The sea says, It 
is not in me, and the deep says, It is not with me. 
Where then shall wisdom be found? . . . God 

81 


Where Do You Liver 


knoweth the place thereof and to every man he 
saith, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; 
and to depart from evil is understanding.” To live 
a reverent and obedient life, an upright and use- 
ful life, that is sound sense and there is no sense 
in any other mode of life. Let every man put first 
things first and rest his weight where the emphasis 
is deserved! That is wisdom! 

We cannot live without him. Life without him 
is not life, it is the death of that which is highest 
in human nature. “Whither shall I go from thy 
presence or flee from thy spirit?” If I ascend up 
into heaven on the wings of aspiration, He is 
there. If I make my bed in hell by some wretched 
form of wrongdoing, He is there. If I take the 
wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost 
parts of the sea, even there his hand will lead me 
and his right hand will hold me. If I say, surely 
the darkness of a shady life will cover me, even 
the night shall be light about me. The light and 
the dark are both alike to him. 

“In the beginning God,”—and all through these 
changing lives of ours that same sense of a Divine 
Presence! For our help and guidance, if we are 
striving to do his will; for our rebuke and final 
defeat, if we are headed wrong! “Behold the fear 
of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from 
evil is understanding.” 

The main asset in any life is to be found not 
in the abundance of the things possessed but in 

82 


V I—The Failures of Success 


certain qualities of mind and heart. It is to be 
found in one’s power to respond to great princi- 
ples and great ideals, to great books, great music, 
great scenes in nature. It is to be found in the 
love of family and friends, of country and of God. 
To do all this and to do it well is to live. And it is 
nothing less than tragic that millions of people 
_ face the whole world order which supports them 
with no other thought than that of making out of 
it all they can for themselves. 


It is just as Harry Emerson Fosdick said re- 
cently: “In the Sixteenth Century, the great con- 
flict in the world’s life centered in the church—it 
was the day of the Protestant Reformation. In 
the Eighteenth Century, the great conflict in the 
world’s life centered in politics—it was the day 
for a new birth of democracy in the French and 
the American Revolutions. In the Twentieth Cen- 
tury, the great conflict of the world’s life will 
center in Economics.” 

We are concerned most of all in bringing the 
whole industrial order under the rule of moral 
purpose. We are unwilling to go on building barns 
and banks and filling barns and banks with 
things, unless at the same time we are filling all 
these busy streets with manhood and womanhood 
of a higher type. 

History tells us that an excess of money, leisure 
and pleasure at one end of the social scale, means 

83 


Where Do You Live? 


an excess of drudgery and misery at the other 
end. That is the way the social teeterboard works. 
Whole families have gone down in moral defeat 
under the weight of bitter, hopeless, degrading 
poverty. And whole families have gone down in 
defeat because of the temptations which great 
wealth brings. 

Would anyone say that the morals of Fifth 
Avenue are any better than the morals of Main 
Street? The rich people are not all bad and the 
poor people are not all good—nor would that 
statement be true the other way round. It is 
hard to say which class thinks the most about 
things, those who have them or those who haven’t 
them yet want them oftentimes more than they 
want anything else on earth. But whether the 
things owned are many or few, we cannot have a 
Christian civilization until we measure success by 
some better standard than that of material accu- 
mulation. Life is not made up of things—life is 
faith and hope and love finding expression in finer 
conduct. 


I have been dealing with this short story of a 
man who did not understand life mainly in terms 
of personal experience. How directly also it bears 
upon the life of a nation! Here in this broad land 
of ours, with resources unparalleled, men have 
shown themselves amazingly competent in han- 
dling the materials of human well-being. We have 

84 


VI—tThe Failures of Success 


shown ourselves able to build barns and build 
them bigger, able to fill them with things and fill 
them faster, than any other set of men on earth. 

But when we come to the adjustment of human 
relations in industry, in political action, in com- 
munity life, we have oftentimes been woefully 
clumsy. We are rich in materials for self-indul- 
gence—we are not so well-to-do in those qualities 
of mind and heart which make a nation rich 
toward God. 

Here are great sections of our organized life 
where men are putting first that which is not first. 
We cannot build a civilization which will stand 
or a social order fit to live in on the basis of un- 
restrained self-interest or the spirit of self-indul- 
gence. And if this white civilization of ours is not 
to bring up with a smash, with another smash, 
which might possibly be the end of it, there must 
come a finer spirit of consideration for our fellows 
in the workaday world. 

There must come also more democratic meth- 
ods in the control of our great industries. There 
must come a more equitable distribution of the 
good things of life between those who toil mainly 
with their heads and those who toil mainly with 
their hands. There must come a steadier exalta- 
tion of the human values at stake in this huge 
economic process. There must come a wider and 
a more complete dominance of the mind that was 
in Christ. And the needed advance along that high 

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Where Do You Liver 


and hard road of social redemption cannot be 
made by men who are fools—it can only be made 
by men who know what life really is. 


The great historians of the Roman Empire, 
Gibbon, Mommsen, Ferrero, all agree that the © 
five main contributing causes which led to the 
downfall of Rome were these: The prevalence of 
luxury, which ate out the moral fiber of the more 
fortunate class and destroyed the simpler Stoic 
virtues of an earlier day! The frequency of 
divorce, which undermined the stability of the 
family, which was Rome’s best contribution to 
the civilization of that period! Excessive taxation, 
which discouraged thrift and clogged the wheels 
of industry! Men said, as they are saying now, 
“Tf the government is to take it all anyway, what 
is the use?” The cheapening of citizenship by the 
importation into the body politic of great num- 
bers of slaves and of foreigners with lower civic 
standards! The killing off of great numbers of 
strong, brave, public-spirited young men in their 
incessant wars. When these forces had been 
operating for several generations, Rome’s powers 
of resistance were lowered to the danger point— 
when the hard test came she went down with a 
crash. 

How far are these forces operating today in 
our own American life? Four of them at least 
are very much in evidence. We too have much to 

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VI—tThe Failures of Success | 


fear from the prevalence of thoughtless, showy 
luxury and from the frequency of divorce, from 
the economic effect of excessive taxation and from 
the lowering of the standards of citizenship. If 
this Republic is to endure, to advance and to 
fulfill the high destiny to which we believe it is 
called of God, there must come here among us a 
renewed emphasis upon those lines of thought, of 
feeling and of action which are imperative for 
maintaining the spiritual forces of society at their 
full vigor and of the right quality. ‘Behold the 
fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” for men and for 
nations—‘“‘and to depart from evil is understand- 
ing.” 


Here was One who was not a fool. He under- 
stood life. He owed almost nothing to the material 
side of human existence. He was born in a stable, 
lived the life of a peasant and died upon a cross. 
Yet somehow he was rich beyond any other who 
ever walked this common earth. Rich in that sense 
of inner peace and worth! Rich in human sym- 
pathy and in kindly action! Rich in faith and 
hope and love! 

And the truth he taught, the grace he brought, 
and the life he gave, have done more to cleanse 
and ennoble human existence than any other sin- 
gle influence which can be named. He stands be- 
fore men today saying as he said of old, “I am 
come that ye might have life and have it more 

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Where Do You Liver 


abundantly.” But we can only have it upon his 
terms—and here are the terms! “If thou wouldst 
enter into life, keep the commandments!” “If any 
man would be my disciple” and learn to live, “let 
him deny himself and take up his cross and fol- 
low!” 


88 


Vil 
The Study of Religion 


**CNTUDY to show thyself approved unto God.” 

These words are taken from a letter written 
by an old man to a young man. The older man 
was not just setting sail, as so many of you are 
doing—he was coming into port, for the last time, 
as the event proved, so far as earthly voyages 
went. He had already visited all the countries 
which the younger man had seen and many more 
besides. He too had felt the urge of hot desire, 
the bite and sting of temptation as the younger 
man was feeling them now. He had come straight 
through the year without missing a single month, 
spring, summer, autumn, winter. Here away late 
in December he was summing up his whole phi- 
losophy of life. He was talking with that young 
fellow in no supercilious, patronizing fashion, but 
“man to man,” about the serious business of 
living. 

“Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus 
Christ,” he said. Submit to all those disciplines 
which mean added efficiency. Not by dodging dif- 
ficulties but by overcoming them do men attain. 
‘Watch in all things and make full proof of thy 

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Where Do You Liver 


service’—keep your eyes open and your mind on 
your job that you may make your life an asset, 
not a liability, when society strikes a trial balance. © 
“Stir up the gift of God that is in thee’’—discover 
and utilize the hidden capacity for something finer 
than these surface activities which oftentimes are 
no better than empty gestures. And in order that 
you may do this with some measure of success, 
“study to show thyself approved unto God.” 

Three things he suggests—the habit of study, 
the power of discrimination,—“rightly dividing 
the word of truth”—and the divine appraisal of 
one’s work,—“approved unto God.” Let me speak 
of them in order. 


First, the habit of study! I am not here to make 
a general appeal for the duty and value of honest 
manly study in those fields where your courses 
lie. The men who are set to teach those subjects 
will attend to all that; and if you fail to give heed 
to their insistence upon hard work, you may find 
yourself, when the day of reckoning comes in the 
final examination, on the left-hand side of the 
great white throne numbered with the goats. All 
that can safely be left to your instructors. I am 
here to utter a plain, straight word about the im- 
portance of studying religion, as one of the great 
main interests of human life. 

Religion has to do with those values which are 
supreme and lasting, the spiritual values, the 


90 


VII—Study of Religion 


character values, the quality and direction of a 
man’s inner life. It has to do with the most exalted 
and rewarding form of fellowship open to men 
anywhere, the sense of fellowship between these 
finite spirits of ours and the Infinite Spirit of Him 
who is above all. It has to do with the final goal 
of all our efforts, the establishment upon earth of 
what we call “the kingdom of heaven,” the rule 
of the divine spirit in our human affairs. 

Here are interests beside which the bridging of 
a river or the sinking of a shaft, the building of a 
huge department store or the erection of a factory 
for the manufacture of things, becomes of second- 
ary importance. Religion deals directly with life, 
the meaning of it, the full realization of it, the 
possible destiny of it. 


In view of the fact that religion has to do with 
interests so vital one would suppose that men 
would see instantly that religious questions can- 
not be settled offhand between the bites of a 
quick lunch, or while one burns up a cigarette. 

Alas, no! The men who can settle all the great 
questions of religion without ever having studied 
the subject and with only those fragments of 
breath left over from cooling their broth, are like 
the sands of the sea for multitude. It might be 
added, they are like the sands of the sea in other 
respects. But there they are! They have to be 


OI 


Where Do You Live? 


reckoned with and they are often busily engaged 
in urging others to join their ranks and to deal 
with religion in the same superficial manner. 

Several years ago we had on the Campus at 
Yale the melancholy spectacle of a young man 
who wrote for the various college publications 
with vigor if not always with discretion. The vigor 
of his style varied inversely according to the 
square of the measure of his insight. The less he 
knew the louder he wrote. It was said of him that 
“the chip on his shoulder had become a perma- 
nent growth” like a stubborn corn on one’s toe. 

He dealt frequently with the subject of religion, 
College Chapel, Christian work in Dwight Hall, 
the personal faith of students and of faculty mem- 
bers who regarded themselves as Christians. He 
told us in one of his deliverances that in these 
days no man could be regarded as intellectually 
honest who professed to be a Christian and yet 
failed to believe in “the Doctrine of the Immacu- 
late Conception,” as he called it. 

He had never read enough to know that the 
Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is not a 
Protestant doctrine, that it has never been held 
by any branch of the Protestant Church, that it 
has nothing whatever to do with the manner of 
the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a Roman Catholic 
doctrine formulated in 1854 under Pope Pius IX 
and it has to do entirely with the manner of the 
birth of Mary. He did not know that, although it 


92 


V1II—Study of Religion 


is a mere commonplace to anyone who has ever 
studied the Christian religion. 

He then proceeded to tell us that no one could 
be intellectually sincere and be a member of the 
Christian church without believing in that doc- 
trine. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Peter and 
Paul and all the rest of them here in the New 
Testament, would have been a good deal surprised 
to learn that they had been read out of the Chris- 
tian church by a young man here at Yale because 
they did not believe in “the doctrine of the Im- 
maculate Conception,” a doctrine of which no one 
of them has a word to say and of which appar- 
ently no one of them had ever heard. 

Now if this exhibition of religious illiteracy 
stood alone, it would be pathetic but not perhaps 
significant. Unfortunately it is just a sample of 
that sort of dogmatic ignorance frequently dis- 
played by untaught men who undertake publicly 
to discredit the claims of religion without even 
taking the trouble to ascertain the meaning of the 
terms they use. 

We have reached that point of intellectual seri- 
ousness in most fields where the only man who is 
accorded the right to express an opinion worthy 
of thoughtful consideration is a man who has 
studied the subject. We have reached that point 
in law and in economics, in physics and in chemis- 
try. If any man should undertake to write articles 
or to give public addresses on physics or chemis- 


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Where Do You Liver 


try without having studied the subject, he would 
be simply making an indecent intellectual expo- 
sure of himself. When any man undertakes to 
write articles or to make speeches about religion 
without having studied the subject, his perform- 
ances are equally distressing to all those who have 
any sense of propriety. 


I am not here making an appeal for this set of 
religious beliefs or for that, for my own theologi- 
cal opinions or for some other man’s—I am mak- 
ing a plea for intellectual honesty, seriousness and 
thoroughness on the part of college trained men in 
dealing with religion, which is so vital to personal 
character and social well-being. No other single 
force can be named which has entered so widely, 
so continuously, so powerfully into the renewal of 
man’s moral nature, into the shaping of his ulti- 
mate ideals and into the formation of character, 
as that sense of contact and fellowship between 
the human and the divine which we call religion. 
You cannot call anyone educated who has not 
studied that subject sufficiently to warrant him 
in having an intelligent opinion. 

Here you are making up your mind what will 
be your personal attitude toward religion! Will 
you be an adherent, an opponent, or merely a man 
on the fence? Have the mental honesty to earn 
your right to make an intelligent decision, instead 
of doing it on hearsay and chit chat! 


94 


VII—Study of Religion 


You are deciding, for example, whether you will 
believe in God or in some other interpretation of 
the world order where we find ourselves! Look 
into the basis and implications of that faith as 
intelligent men hold it! Read such books as Hock- 
ing’s The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 
William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, 
John Fiske’s, Through Nature to God, Borden P. 
Bowne’s Philosophy of Theism, Douglass C. Mac- 
Intosh’s The Reasonableness of Christianity! 
They are all written in popular rather than in 
technical style. Ascertain how far that faith in 
God is grounded in reason and reinforced by the 
experience of thoughtful, aspiring men through 
long periods of time and over wide areas of reflec- 
tion. Then you will at least understand the mean- 
ing of the terms employed and know something 
as to what can be said for or against that inter- 
pretation of the world order. 

You want to adopt a reasonable attitude toward 
that spiritual exercise called “prayer.” “Is prayer 
a force or a farce?” It was not a minister of reli- 
gion, it was Charles W. Eliot, the former presi- 
dent of Harvard University, a man trained in 
early life as a chemist, familiar therefore with the 
scientific method, who said, “Prayer is the trans- 
cendent act of human intelligence.” He felt that 
the human mind stands on its highest level of 
privilege and function when a man prays. 

How strange it is that thousands of people 


95 


Where Do You Live? 


undertake to pass upon the value of prayer with- 
out even learning the meaning of the term! There 
are any number of little children running about, 
aged all the way from five to fifty, uttering their 
innocent prattle about prayer. They seem to think 
that it is the act of a skillful beggar undertaking 
to get something for nothing by making a few 
appealing gestures or by uttering a few fervent 
sobs. They think that when a man prays, he must 
feel that he can manipulate all the forces of earth 
and sky in his own interest just because he is on 
his knees. 

Study the subject before you make bold to say 
that there is nothing in it! You may be led by 
study and experience to feel that if a man asks, 
he will receive, that if he seeks, he will find. Learn 
something about the methods of that mysterious 
prayer-force, silent and mysterious like the power 
of gravitation (in which everyone believes—the 
nature of which no one understands). Study until 
you know something as to how that prayer-force 
operates and works out its beneficent results in 
human experience. 

Read Fosdick’s The Meaning of Prayer, a 
little book which an eminent layman in Boston 
has told us recently entirely revolutionized his 
way of thinking and changed the whole quality 
of his inner life. Read the book called Prayer, 
by Streeter and others, a group of Oxford profes- 
sors who make their approach to this subject from 


96 


VIIi—Study of Religion 


various angles, historical, psychological, philo- 
sophical, scientific. Then when you talk about 
prayer or think about it, or pray yourself, you 
will not be merely beating and heating the air. 
You will know what you are talking about and 
what you are doing. This is my first plea, for that 
mental honesty, seriousness and thoroughness 
which we give to other vital interests of human 
life. Study religion that you may know the truth 
_ which makes men free. 


In the second place, the habit of discrimination 
—“Rightly dividing the word of truth!” You may 
hear some noisy exhorter saying, “I believe in the 
whole Bible from cover to cover, every word of 
it and every syllable, as the infallible word of 
God.” His language is the language of the pro- 
moter or the auctioneer, claiming more for his 
wares than the facts warrant, with the idea that 
when the inevitable scaling down takes place in 
the minds of his hearers, they will reach an ap- 
proximation of the truth. 

It is a method which must be offensive to Him 
who said, ‘I am the truth.” Here in the Bible are 
recorded the words of the devil—they are not the 
word of God, for, as the Bible itself says, the devil 
has been a liar from the beginning. Here are the 
words of bad men who spoke to deceive and in- 
jure others—their words are not the word of God. 
Here are the words of good men, but some of 


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Where Do You Liver 


them lived in a period of immature religious de- 
velopment. They wrote as they saw and they saw 
through a glass darkly. We have this whole 
heavenly treasure of divine truth in earthen ves- 
sels and the truth often takes shape and color and 
odor from the vessel which contains it. 

Now it is the duty of the intelligent man, who 
has studied his subject, rightly to divide the word 
of truth. He separates that which is merely local 
in its meaning and application from that which is 
universal in its scope. He separates that which is 
temporary, the best that was felt and known and 
practiced at that time, from that which is worthy 
to abide because it is timeless. He separates that 
which is merely incidental from that which is vital 
and essential. He rightly divides the word of 
truth. 

The Bible is not one solid block of inspired 
truth in all of its sixty-six books which stretch 
over a period of more than a thousand years of 
mental and spiritual development. The Bible is a 
record of the progressive revelation which God 
made of Himself through the religious experiences 
of a people chosen for their spiritual capacity. It 
is the business of intelligence rightly to divide this 
word of truth, so that we may see the various 
portions of it in their true perspective. Near 
things as near in their bearing and application, 
remote things as remote! Truths at the center of 
the picture as vital, things off to one side as 


98 


VII—Study of Religion 

merely incidental! When we do that, we shall find 
here that truth which is “a lamp unto our feet and 
a light unto our path,” making us wise unto salva- 
tion and furnishing us with motive and guidance 
for all good work. 


Here in these writings, which have become 
classic in the field of character building, are 
principles and ideals which will outlast the stars— 
they are final words! “Love one another as I have 
loved you!” “Ye therefore shall be perfect as your 
Father in heaven is perfect.” ‘““May Christ dwell 
in your hearts by faith until you are filled with all 
the fulness of God.” These are final words—they 
leave nothing more to be said or desired! 

Here are portrayals of moral excellence which 
have power to command human aspiration at its 
best and lead it on! Men follow these portrayals 
and find them flying goals, forever in the lead. 
Here are conceptions of the divine before which 
reason and conscience on the highest levels known 
to us have bowed in glad allegiance for nineteen 
hundred years and will continue to bow! They 
do not lie on the surface—fools and wayfaring 
men, as they hurry by, may miss them altogether; 
but they are the sure reward of insight, judgment, 
discrimination. Study until you can rightly divide 
that word of truth. 

Let religion be judged as other great interests 
are judged, “by its power to contribute to the 


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Where Do You Liver 


well rounded development of joyous existence.” 
“By their fruits ye shall know.” It was the Mas- 
ter of all the higher values who proposed this 
pragmatic test, the test of experience, the test 
which comes from the ability or the inability of 
the thing under scrutiny to work out satisfactory 
results. 

By this test we judge the claims of music, of 
art, of literature. We are content that religion 
should stand or fall by the same test, by its power 
to contribute to that well-rounded development of 
human existence. The working power of any be- 
lief or of any interest must have weight when we 
come to pass upon its validity. And the only man 
who can apply that test for himself is the man 
who has studied his subject with discrimination. 


Finally, seek the divine appraisal upon your 
work—‘“Study to show thyself approved unto 
God.” 

Here in a council of wise men assembled long 
ago was one man who had taken his doctor’s de- 
gree in the law. He was a “Doctor of Laws.” His 
name was Gamaliel, and he was so just, so reason- 
able, so broad-minded in his determinations that 
he was held in high honor by all the people. When 
he was called upon to pass upon the claims of the 
Christian religion, of which he was not at that 
time a personal adherent, his word was this: “Let 
these men alone! If this counsel be of men, it will 

100 


VII—Study of Religion 

come to naught. But if it be of God, ye cannot 
overthrow it, lest haply ye be found fighting 
against God.” Then he supported his decision, as 
a good lawyer would, by citing a list of historical 
precedents. 

His method was sound. If all these beliefs, 
aspirations, practices of Christian people in this 
age and in all the ages past, are mere human 
devices for satisfying personal whims, then they 
will pass as all such devices have passed. “The 
little systems have their day, they have their day 
and cease to be.” 

But if these beliefs, aspirations, practices, have 
behind them and within them the lift and urge of 
the great moral order which enfolds us as surely 
and as steadily as the physical order which en- 
folds us; if these beliefs, aspirations and practices 
lie within the will and purpose of the Eternal who 
is above all, then we cannot overthrow them, lest 
haply we be found fighting against God. When 
men fight against God, they go down in defeat. 
And it is your business and mine, by study and 
by living on the highest levels open to us, to learn 
how far religion has its sanction in that moral 
order that we may show ourselves approved unto 
God. 


It was one of our leading American preachers 
who said not long ago: “I cannot believe that the 
law and order of things fails at the top. I cannot 

IOI 


Where Do You Live? 


believe that while we live in a real world in our 
physical relationships and in a true world in our 
mental action, that we live in a lie or a vacuum 
in the insights and confidences of the soul.” He 
would have every man study until by his own 
growth in knowledge, in judgment and in all the 
profounder experiences of life, he might feel him- 
self approved unto God. 

“J appeal to Caesar,” a man once cried, when 
he was arraigned for taking a certain position in 
accordance with his own religious convictions. “I 
appeal to Caesar!” I appeal to the highest! He 
would carry his case up from those lower provin- 
cial courts to the highest tribunal in the Roman 
empire, and get a Supreme Court decision upon 
its merits. 

He appealed to Caesar—so do I! So must we 
all! What does the highest have to say about reli- 
gion? What does the highest in these natures of 
ours, the highest in history, Jesus Christ, the high- 
est in the whole scale of being, have to say touch- 
ing the habit of worship and the value of prayer, 
the enthronement of conscience and the exalta- 
tion of the spirit of service, the locating of our 
supreme good not in outer things but in inner 
worth and the feeling of loyalty to the Master? 

What does the highest have to say on these 
points? You know full well. When our minds are 
clearest, when our hearts are purest, when our 
wills are most firmly set to do His will, then these 

102 


VII—Study of Religion 


great spiritual verities become the most real and 
commanding facts in our whole experience. Study 
to show thyself approved unto God, for that will 
bring into your life the sense of peace and of 
power and of plenty. 


103 


Vill 
What Is That to Thee? 


E find here in the last chapter of the 

fourth Gospel a boatload of men who had 
been fishing all night on the Sea of Galilee. They 
were cold and hungry and cross. The wind blows 
chill across that lake in early Spring—and this 
was at Easter time. Men who have been out on 
the water all night are always hungry. And any 
man who has fished all night or all day without 
catching anything—‘“and that night they caught 
nothing”—is cross. They were cold and hungry 
and cross. 

But just at daybreak in the gray, uncertain 
light, they saw a figure moving yonder on the 
shore. Presently a voice called out, “Have you 
caught anything?” As we say, “What luck?” 
“Have you any meat?” They answered, “No.” 

Then the voice came again, “Cast your net on 
the right side of the boat.” They were fishing in 
the wrong place, fishing out of the wrong side of 
the boat. Now when they cast their net in obedi- 
ence to that voice, they made a wonderful catch. 
They could scarcely draw their net for the multi- 
tude of fishes. 

104 


VI1I—tThe Vital and the Trivial 


The men in that boat had enjoyed similar ex- 
periences in the months that were gone and in- 
stantly they linked up that catch of fish with what 
they had known of Jesus of Nazareth. They 
looked at one another and said, “It is the Lord.” 

It was the Lord! He knew where to fish, just as 
he knew so many other things which have to do 
with human well-being. And when Peter, the 
leader of the group, realized that it was the Lord, 
he could not wait for them to draw their net and 
land their fish. He jumped overboard and swam 
ashore to be the first to greet his Lord. Impulsive 
always—he acted first and thought it over later! 


When the men in that boat came ashore, draw- 
ing the net with the fishes, they found a fire of 
coals with fish broiling and bread toasting for 
their breakfast. They sat down around that camp- 
fire to break bread with him who is the Bread of 
Life. Why has no great artist given us a splendid 
canvas of “The Last Breakfast”? We have won- 
derful pictures of “The Last Supper’”—The Last 
Breakfast also was full of spiritual suggestion. 

When the seven men had eaten and were smil- 
ing again, Jesus began to ask them about their 
feeling for him. “Lovest thou me?” Three times 
over the answer of Peter came back clear and 
firm,—‘“Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.” 
Then Jesus gave them that threefold commission 
—‘‘Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. Tend my 

105 


Where Do You Live? 


sheep.” He also added a prophetic word touching 
the hardship in store for Peter. “When thou wert 
young, thou didst gird thyself and walk whither 
thou wouldst. When thou art old, others shall gird 
thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not. 
This he said signifying by what death Peter 
should glorify God.” 


Now by all the rules of art the scene should 
end right there! You cannot add anything to it— 
it has reached a splendid climax! The cold, the 
hunger and the disappointment of those men re- 
placed by food and warmth and good cheer! 
Their fine, frank declaration of love for the Mas- 
ter and their joy in his presence! The high com- 
mission for an exalted service and that sure word 
of prophecy touching the showing they would 
make in the face of danger! Let the curtain fall— 
the clock has struck twelve! 

But no! The men who wrote the Bible were 
honest men and they drew the thing as they saw 
it for the God of things as they are. They painted 
men as they found them, warts, wrinkles, blem- 
ishes and all. Swift on the heels of that glowing 
word of Christ came an ill-advised remark from 
Peter and then a foolish question. 

Peter asked a great many foolish questions. He 
did it, the record says, “because he wist not what 
to say.” There are people who, when they do not 
know what to say, promptly open their mouths 

106 


VitI—The Vital and the Trivial 


and say it. When they do not know what to do, 
they go right out and do it. Peter was one of them. 
When he heard what was in store for him, he 
looked at John and said, ‘Lord, what shall this 
man do?” What kind of a time will he have! Will 
his role in the advancing kingdom be any easier 
than mine? And that was none of Peter’s affair. 
The Lord looked him straight in the eyes and 
said: “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” 
What will this man do and that man and the 
man across the aisle? What is the meaning of this 
item in the great world process and of that and 
of some other odd bit? How many foolish ques- 
tions men ask by way of excusing themselves from 
some exacting obligation! Let me notice some of 
those questions which the lawyers would call “‘in- 
competent, irrelevant and immaterial.” 


First, questions of belief! We have made some 
headway here. When I spoke at student confer- 
ences or religious forums thirty years ago and 
questions were allowed at the close of the address, 
someone was sure to ask: “Where did Cain get 
his wife? How did the whale manage to swallow 
Jonah and keep him down for three days without 
digesting him? How did those devils pass from 
the body of the man in Gadara into the bodies of 
the swine?” I have wasted a lot of breath which 
would have cooled my porridge replying to such 

107 


Where Do You Live? 


queries. We may thank God that those questions 
for the most part have been buried beyond any 
hope of a resurrection. 

But other questions equally trivial have taken 
their places. How can we reconcile the account of 
the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis with 
the facts of science and with our belief in evolu- 
tion? How can the Bible be the inspired word of 
God when there are apparently discrepancies in 
some of its own statements? What about the Vir- 
gin Birth? What about a personal devil? What 
about the second coming of Christ? When and 
how will he come and will we be caught up to 
meet the Lord in the air? 

These questions have had a prominent place in 
the public prints during the last few years. When 
these inquiries fall upon the ears of thoughtful 
men, they feel like saying, “What is all that to 
thee? Follow him!” Bring your own life into 
obedience to the highest you see and along that 
line of a clear, firm loyalty to Jesus Christ the 
really vital problems will be solved. If any man 
has the will to do what he believes to be his will, 
he shall know all that he needs to know for life 
and service. 


When some of these questions are asked, how 
strong and fine seems the modest reticence of the 
men who wrote the Bible! Take that first sentence 

108 


VilI—The Vital and the Trivial 


in it—‘In the beginning, God created the heavens 
and the earth.” 

How long ago? When did it all happen? The 
author was too wise to suggest any date—he did 
not know, any more than men know today. 

Some men seeking to be wise beyond their 
powers have tried to fix the date. Doctor John 
Lightfoot, vice chancellor of the University of 
Cambridge in England, one of the most eminent 
Hebrew scholars in his day, declared that as a 
result of the most careful and exhaustive study of 
the Scriptures it had been shown that God created 
the world in the year 4004 B.c. on the twenty- 
eighth day of October at nine o’clock in the fore- 
noon. 

He had figured it all out as definitely as the 
statements of a time-table on the railroad. He 
named October, because he said it was apparent 
that it occurred in the autumn when apples were 
ripe, in view of the statements made in the chap- 
ter which follows about Adam and Eve eating the 
forbidden fruit. We smile at his simplicity today 
just as men one hundred years from now will 
smile at some of our dogmatism both in religion 
and in science. 

When was man created? Six thousand years 
ago? A million years ago? Ten million years ago, 
as one scientific man undertook to say recently? 

What does it matter? What are five or ten mil- 
lions of years more or less among friends! The 

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Where Do You Liver 


man who wrote that first verse in the Bible was 
too wise to enter upon any question of dates. “In 
the beginning God created man in his own like- 
ness and image,” the only created being, so far as 
we know, with capacity for spiritual fellowship 
with his Maker. There he left it. 

How did God create the world? By a quick 
succession of creative acts as a carpenter might 
build a garage in a couple of days, or by a long, 
patient process of creative evolution? Again the 
writer does not say. He has the sense of reserve. 
His words suggest rather the process. “Let the 
earth bring forth herbs bearing seed and trees 
bearing fruit, each after its kind! Let the waters 
bring forth abundantly moving creatures that 
have life’! Let them do it—it was to come ap- 
parently by the operation of certain resident 
forces in the earth and in the waters themselves. 
And his thought was that the earliest forms of 
animal life were the marine forms rather than 
land animals, which is in agreement with the best 
we know today. 

The first chapter of Genesis is a stately poem 
rather than a scientific document. In the begin- 
ning, God! Back of all these changing phe- 
nomena, God the Father Almighty, Maker of 
heaven and earth, the Infinite and Eternal Energy 
from whom all things proceed. The author placed 
at the center and foundation of the universe, 
Being, Personality, Intelligent Purpose, a Benign 

IIo 


VitI—tThe Vital and the Trivial 


Will. And into the question of dates and details, 
he was too wise to enter. 


What about the Virgin Birth? How did Jesus 
enter this life of ours? Did he have but one 
human parent or did he have two, as all the rest 
of us have? 

What does it matter? However he came, he was 
what he was. Whatever the mode of his birth, his 
impress upon the higher life of the race has been 
as we all know it. We do not rest our faith in his 
divinity upon the method of his physical birth but 
upon his qualities of mind and heart, upon the 
redemptive energy he has shown in saving men 
from their sins. Flesh and blood has not revealed 
it unto us, but the Father who is in heaven, by 
those inner experiences which the coming of 
Christ into the life of the world has made possible. 

When anyone asks me, “What do you say 
about the Virgin Birth?” I usually reply, “I say 
just what Paul said.” Then they begin to think! 
What did Paul say? 

He did not say anything! In all of his recorded 
letters and sermons not a syllable about the Vir- 
gin Birth! He had much to say about the death | 
and the resurrection of Christ, about the redemp- 
tion he accomplished, about “Christ in us the 
hope of glory,” about the fact that he would reign 
until he had put all enemies under his feet, but 

Iit 


Where Do You Live? 


never a word about the Virgin Birth. I am quite 
content to stand where Paul stood. 

And so with those other questions about a per- 
sonal devil and the second coming of Christ and 
the nature of hell and all the rest! They have a 
certain speculative interest for some minds, but 
what have they to do with life and conduct? Is 
life any the richer because a man takes one view 
of them rather than another? In the face of their 
remoteness from daily duty and in the absence of 
any conclusive data, we feel like saying: “What 
js all that to us? Let us follow him and not waste 
one hour in unprofitable speculation!” 


In the second place, questions as to personal 
fortune! In his early life Peter was a fisherman 
on the Sea of Galilee. He lived a free, glad, out- 
door life. Now the Master told him that when he 
was old others would gird him and carry him 
where he would not want to go. He was destined 
as a Christian apostle in that rude time to suffer 
hardship and persecution. 

Peter saw John standing near by. John was the 
younger man of the two; John belonged to a 
family with more means apparently than Peter’s 
family. Peter wondered whether he would suffer 
the same hard fate. “Lord, what shall this man 
do?” Then the voice said: “What is that to thee? 
Follow me and let that other man answer for 
himself.” 


It2 


VItI—The Vital and the Trivial 


I feel a ready sympathy for every young man 
who finds life difficult. My father was a small 
farmer in the Middle West. My dear mother did 
all her own housework until after she was fifty 
years of age and yet found time and strength to 
teach her children and to become to each one of 
us the strongest, the sweetest, the holiest earthly 
influence we ever knew. We lived modestly, with 
few of what the world calls pleasures and none of 
its luxuries. I worked my own way through the 
university. I never enjoyed any of the benefits of 
travel in those years—I was twenty-one years old 
before I had ever seen a city large enough to 
have street cars. 

I speak of this merely to indicate my sympathy 
with all those who have to face difficulty. When a 
young man is placed in such a situation and looks 
out upon the lives of those fortunate people who 
seem to have everything brought to them on a sil- 
ver tray, he sometimes becomes envious and re- 
bellious. “Why should they have all that,” he says 
to himself, “and I be shut up in this narrow 
round?” Then the voice comes, ‘“‘What is that to 
thee!” You are not responsible for the circum- 
stances of your early life. You are only respon- 
sible for playing well your part with the lines and 
in the lines which are given you. 


Here is a man in an orchestra which is about to 
render the Overture to Tannhdauser. He plays the 
113 


Where Do You Liver 


flute. He announces that he will not play his part 
until he knows whether all those other men are 
equally competent to play their parts. He will not 
play until he knows why he has a flute when some 
other man has the first violin or a cello or a 
French horn. He sulks in his chair and the Over- 
ture sweeps on without him, lacking the contribu- 
tion which the great composer intended him to 
make. 

Let him take up his flute and blow into it and 
play the score as it is laid before him! Therein 
lies his honor and therein lies the honor of the 
whole orchestra, each man following the beat and 
giving of his own best! 

Here is a young fellow in college! He was 
brought up in a Christian home. He has seen the 
whole range of Christian ideals shining in his sky 
like fixed stars. He believes in the depths of his 
heart that no other mode of life can compare for 
one moment with a genuinely Christian life. He 
knows that it is up to him to show his colors and 
declare his faith by living as a child of God. 

But he begins to ask questions. What will these 
other fellows in my class do? What attitude will 
this group of intimate friends take toward reli- 
gion? If I stand out clear and firm for the highest 
I see, will I have to stand alone? 

What has all that to do with it! Life is not 
following the herd, whether the herd happens to 
be headed right or headed wrong. Life is stand- 


114 


V I1I—The Vital and the Trivial 


ing on one’s own two feet, carving for one’s self 
in the field of duty, ordering one’s own life in 
harmony with what he believes to be the will of 
God. That is life—running with the herd is just 
a feeble caricature. 

The time comes sooner or later when everyone 
is compelled to say: “The night is dark and I am 
far from home, lead thou me on! I do not ask to 
see the distant scene, one step enough for me— 
lead thou me on.” The possible action of this 
other man, the outcome of one’s own fidelity to 
duty, the final meaning of some of these puzzling 
experiences—these are not matters of immediate 
concern. Let each man follow Him who for nine- 
teen centuries has shown himself competent to 
lead! We may be sure that the “kindly light” will 
lead him on “o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and 
torrent, till the night is gone.” 


In the third place, questions as to the ultimate 
solution of certain puzzling problems. There came 
a day when a man said to Jesus, “Lord are there 
few that be saved?” How many? One in ten? One 
in a hundred? Or will there be a good working 
majority of spiritual successes? 

This man also has his followers. Yonder in the 
Library of Harvard University you will find a 
book written two hundred years ago by a learned 
Oxford professor entitled Moral Reflections Upon 
the Probable Number of the Elect. He undertook 


5 


Where Do You Live? 


to show from Scripture that not one in a hundred 
thousand, and probably, he added in a footnote, 
not one in a million, of all those who have lived 
since the time of Adam, will finally be saved. 

One in a million! It was a discouraging outlook 
for the New Jerusalem. It made the city of God 
seem like a lonesome sort of place compared with 
that other place with its teeming population. 

What did Jesus say? He did not burst out after 
the manner of some with a bit of thoughtless 
optimism. Why, everybody will be saved—that is, 
almost everybody, with the exception of some of 
those rascals yonder in States Prison! He did not, 
on the other hand, say in gloomy fashion, “Very 
few; a mere handful,—scarcely one in a million.” 

None of that! He declined to enter upon any 
such unprofitable speculation. ‘Lord are there 
few that be saved?” Jesus answered, “Strive to 
enter in at the strait gate.” Do your duty as a 
Christian with fidelity and thoroughness, leaving 
all those questions to Him who knows. The Judge 
of all the earth will do right. 


When men become remote and visionary in 
dealing with spiritual reality, the Lord calls them 
down and focuses their attention upon “the small 
end, the near end of these great problems,” as 
Brooke Herford once said. Newton discovered the 
law of gravitation which holds the planets true to 
their courses by watching an apple fall from the 

116 


VI{I—tThe Vital and the Trivial 


tree. James Watt discovered the power of steam 
by watching the lid of the teakettle rise and fall 
when the water boiled. Benjamin Franklin learned 
about electricity as he felt a pricking sensation 
in his fingers when he held a wet kite string after 
sending his kite with the steel points aloft during 
a thunderstorm. Charles Darwin learned about 
organic evolution and made ready to write the 
Origin of Species by studying the earthworms and 
bumblebees in the fields of Kent and in tracing 
the growth of the lower forms of marine life. 

If anyone would learn the truth about God and 
man, about duty, prayer, redemption and the 
coming of his kingdom, let him take hold of these 
realities also by the near end, the small end, the 
end which relates itself at once to his own experi- 
ence! 

I have not the slightest idea what the final out- 
come of all these moral processes which we see at 
work will be. I have no idea how the final con- 
summation will be reached or what it will be like 
when it is reached. How in the world should I 
know! 3 

Here was a private soldier in the trenches in 
the Great War! He did not feel quite sure as to 
just how the campaign was going there in the 
Argonne or on some of the other salients or over 
on the East Front. He would take it very kindly 
if Marshal Foch would step out and explain the 
whole situation to him more fully. He would like 

117 


Where Do You Liver 


to know the meaning of all these military ma- 
noeuvres before he continues any further in the 
performance of his duty. And if the Marshal does 
not explain then he stands ready to shake his fist 
at the Marshal and to refuse to serve. 

So is every man who looks out with uncertain 
eyes upon this puzzling world and shakes his fist 
at his Maker, refusing the call of Christian life 
until all of his difficulties are cleared up. What is 
that to thee! Do your duty and leave the rest to 
him who knows! 


There is a legend—it is only a legend—that 
when the early Christians were being persecuted 
to the death in the City of Rome, Peter was there. 
When he saw men and women being thrown to the 
lions or burned alive for their Christian faith, it 
was too much for him. He ran away to deny his 
Lord for the fourth time. 

Just outside the walls of Rome Peter met a 
man carrying a cross. He did not recognize the 
man at first and he said to him in Latin, “Quo 
vadis?” “Where are you going?” 

The man replied sadly, “I am going to Rome to 
be crucified again.” Then Peter knew him and 
again he “wept bitterly.” He turned around and 
went back to Rome to bear his testimony as a 
good soldier of Jesus Christ, cost what it might. 

What shall this man do and that man and some. 
other man? What is the meaning of this and of 

118 


VIilI—tThe Vital and the Trivial 


that and of something else? What is that to thee 
or to me! Let us follow him into the unknown if 
need be, making our theological maps as we gol 


11g 


IX 
The Man and the Machine 


¢| Paes was an old Hebrew prophet who saw 
human life imperiled by machinery. “The 
wheels within wheels” in his vision, turning this 
way and that way, represented the machinery of 
civilization. “The spirit of the living creature 
within the wheels” represented personality. He 
was afraid that personality in its finer aspects 
might go down. in defeat under the crushing 
weight of the wheels. 

If he felt that danger in that far-away land 
and time, what shall we say? How are “the living 
creatures” faring today in this highly organized, 
intricate life of ours with its vaster system of 
wheels? How are the human values getting on in 
modern industry? How are they getting on in 
coal mining and in steel making, in the noisy fac- 
tories and in the sweat shops? Are we in any 
danger of sacrificing the man to the machine? 

Every man who has eyes in his head knows 
that we are. The adjustment of human relations 
and the safeguarding of personality in industry 
have not kept pace with the improvement of the 
machine. Our technique has outstripped our 

120 


IX—Men and Machines 


morals. The wheels are better oftentimes than the 
people are who keep the wheels turning. Life is 
imperiled by mechanism. 

It is high time that trained men should be 
doing more to remedy that situation. It is part 
of their job in the great years which lie just ahead 
to introduce into the workaday world a larger 
measure of moral idealism. 


Notice these three facts! First, life finds itself 
and expresses itself by the use of mechanism. The 
lower forms of life are almost without organiza- 
tion. The amoeba, for example, is just a bit of 
protoplasm floating in the water. Its processes of 
nutrition and reproduction are exceedingly sim- 
ple. When it wants to eat anything it merely sur- 
rounds it and absorbs it. When it would repro- 
duce, it simply breaks off a piece of itself and 
there you have another amoeba! 

But as we ascend the scale of being, life be- 
comes more and more complex. “The organism 
develops eyes,” as George B. Foster pointed out, 
“because it needs them.” It cannot live so well 
without them, because there is light, and there 
are objects to be seen and studied. When the eyes 
are faulty, the organism puts on spectacles to see 
better. It invents the telescope to see farther, and 
the microscope to see things too minute for the 
naked eye. It widens the range of its powers by 
the use of mechanism. 

I2I 


Where Do You Live? 


“The organism develops ears because it needs 
them.” It cannot live so well without them be- 
cause there are acoustic vibrations, sounds to be 
heard, language, music and all the rest. By a fur- 
ther use of mechanism, it can hear not only what 
is being said or sung in the same room—it hears 
what is being said or sung a thousand miles away. 
I can stand here and talk with a friend in Chicago 
or in San Francisco and recognize all the familiar 
tones of his voice. Life advances steadily by the 
use of mechanism. 

Take a cross section of the life of a civilized 
man in meeting his needs! “He begins his day,” 
as some clever writer once pointed out, “with a 
sponge from the hand of a South Sea Islander 
and a linen towel made in Belfast.” He dresses 
himself in cotton and wool, silk, linen and leather 
from half a dozen different countries. “He sits 
down to his breakfast and eats grapefruit handed 
to him by a Florida negro, has his coffee poured 
out for him by the natives of Java and his rolls 
are passed to him by a Minnesota wheat grower.” 
He is taken to his place of business by the use 
of steel and coal, gasoline or electricity, provided 
by a number of far-reaching organizations. The 
interests of his business may reach out into half 
the lands of earth and be affected by all the winds 
that blow between the North Pole and the South 
Pole. His ordinary life is woven up into a common 

122 


ITX—Men and Machines 


fabric with the interests and activities of a million 
other people. 

Now there is no escape from all that unless we 
go back to the cave. We do not want to go back 
to the cave. This highly organized life which we 
call “civilization” is like the air we breathe. Man 
finds himself, expresses himself, enjoys himself, 
by his use of all this mechanism. Our modern 
civilization is not handmade, it is machine-made. 

And on countless fields the machine shows itself 
superior. The wealthy Hindoo hires a man of low 
caste to keep the punkah moving above his bed 
on hot nights so that he can sleep in comfort. The 
wealthy American turns on an electric fan. The 
fan is better—the servant may go to sleep and 
then the punkah stops. Electricity does not go to 
sleep. We have no desire to go back to those more 
primitive methods—human life finds itself and 
makes advance by the use of the machine. 


In the second place, however, life is sometimes 
overborne by the machine. When I was a boy 
growing up on an Iowa farm, the old village shoe- 
maker made boots with tops on them for my 
father and me. He would measure our feet, rights 
and lefts, select his own leather and proceed to 
make two complete pairs of boots. When we went 
in ten days later to try them on, if they fitted, 
as they usually did, he had the joy of seeing us 
walk off in them and he had the joy of seeing a 


123 


Where Do You Live? 


piece of finished work from his own hand and 
brain. As a result of that method, he was an in- 
telligent, interesting man. He had ideas, senti- 
ments, convictions. He discussed everything under 
the sun with the people who dropped into his shop 
to talk with him as he worked. 

How about those tens of thousands of men and 
women working yonder in the huge shoe shops of 
Lynn and Brockton, Massachusetts, and of St. 
Louis, Missouri? Are they equally intelligent and 
interesting? Each one of them stands there per- 
forming a single bit of monotonous labor with a 
machine on twenty thousand pairs of shoes which 
pass through his hands in the same length of 
time! How much sense of pride and joy have they 
in their work! We have cheaper shoes—not 
always better ones—what about the shoemakers? 
Are they better or only cheaper? 

If we were to place the hand-sickle Ruth used 
when she gleaned after the reapers in the fields of 
Boaz, beside a modern reaping machine made by 
the International Harvester Company, it would 
seem that we had made wonderful progress in 
these three thousand years. Look at her sickle 
and then look at the reaper! 

But if Ruth herself were suddenly to appear 
among the men and women who make and use 
the wheels of modern industry, we might not feel 
so sure of our progress. We have improved on the 
sickle—have we improved on Ruth? I have the 

124 


IT X—Men and Machines 


feeling that Ruth would be able to hold her own 
with the girls who pour out of the huge factories 
and department stores. And the final values to be 
considered, as we all know, are the human values. 


The tendency of the machine is to make a hard 
and hateful sort of world. Compare the general 
happiness of a group of South Sea Islanders in 
their native haunts with the condition of a lot 
of factory hands in the crowded sections of Chi- 
cago, New York, London! The South Sea Is- 
landers seem to be having the best of it. They 
seem to be healthier, happier and more nearly 
fulfilling the purposes of human existence. Shall 
we go back then to breadfruit and bananas and 
that primitive mode of life which borders on bar- 
barism? Every man of us would say, “no.” Then 
we must go on to something better than this in 
our treatment of our less fortunate messmates 
at the board of life. 

There are silly people at large who have the 
idea that because we can travel sixty miles an 
hour on our railroad trains or in our automobiles, 
we are just ten times as civilized as were those 
people who traveled six miles an hour by stage- 
coach or with horse and buggy. And if we can 
travel two hundred and fifty miles an hour by 
aeroplane, then we shall be forty times as well 
off as they were with their slow coaches. 

That is all they know! They have not sense 

125 


Where Do You Live? 


enough to recognize the fact that the speed of the 
machine is entirely secondary. The main question 
is this—Where are we going? What will we do 
when we get there? What will be the total effect 
of our mode of travel upon human welfare? That 
is the question before the house rather than the 
rate of speed! And when we come to appraise our 
mode of life by that saner standard, we do not 
feel exactly like throwing up our hats. 


You can harness a Twenty-Mule team to a load 
of Borax and they will draw it along. You can 
harness steam or electricity or gasoline to that 
same load and that form of energy will draw it 
along much faster. But the question still remains, 
Who is going to drive, right purpose or wrong 
purpose, conscience or a careless disregard for 
the interests of others? 

Is all this magnificent energy which we have 
harnessed to the tasks of modern industry, draw- 
ing the human race uphill or downhill? By our 
use of all this machinery are we becoming cleaner, 
kindlier and more aspiring, or are we in danger of 
becoming hardened, coarsened, materialized? The 
question as to the total effect of it all upon human 
life is far and away more important than the size 
or the speed of the mules which draw the load. 
And when we come to look our modern industrial- 
ism in the face without blinking, we know full 
well that in many sections of the workaday world 

126 


I X—Men and Machines 


the human values do suffer hurt and loss at the 
hands of the machine. 

One of the hardest problems in modern indus- 
try is to keep human life interesting, desirable, 
worthy, in a highly commercialized system, with- 
out sacrificing that efficiency upon which all life 
depends. Can we have efficiency without paying 
too big a price for it! If the human values are 
steadily going down in defeat under the pressure 
of that demand and under the crushing weight of 
the wheels, then we are paying too big a price for 
increased production and increased profits. We 
cannot afford to pay any such price—we have no 
right to pay it. Human life worthy of the name 
is more precious than diamonds and rubies, to say 
nothing of steel and coal and cheaper shoes! We 
cannot go on after that fashion, as honest men 
with some decent regard for those fellows whose 
interests are bound up with our own in that enter- 
prise. 


In the third place then, it is the office of intelli- 
gence and conscience to control the machine in the 
interests of a worthier mode of life. Modern civili- 
zation, if it has any right to be here at all, has 
come that we might have life and that we might 
have it more abundantly. And that high end can 
be achieved only by moral purpose and aspiration. 

Here in my hand I hold a knife made of the 
finest tempered steel. It has an edge like that of 

127 


Where Do You Liver 


a razor. There is no magical quality in the knife 
itself giving it the power of life or of death—it is 
only a tool. It may work for human betterment 
or for human injury—it all depends upon the 
quality of moral purpose which wields it. In the 
hands of a surgeon, wise, skillful, conscientious, 
the knife may readily be used to save life. In the 
hands of a madman or a criminal it may just as 
readily be used to destroy life. 

Now all the material and machinery of modern 
civilization, all these political devices and all 
these forms of economic organization, are only 
tools. They have no magical efficacy in them. 
They may be made to help or they may be made 
to hurt—it all depends upon the quality of moral 
purpose which wields them. And you will agree 
with me instantly that the main defect in our 
modern civilization lies in the fact that in our 
national culture and in our systems of education, 
in our vocational training and in our industrial 
methods, we have been giving too much attention 
to the sharpening of our knives and not enough 
attention to the securing of those qualities of mind 
and heart which would wield those knives aright. 

It was Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, writing as a 
trained economist, who said not long ago: “The 
chief object of training is not the gaining of added 
information or the acquiring of technical skill. 
It is the development of certain habits, ideals, 
powers. Habits of self-command, ideals of duty 

128 


I X—Men and Machines 


and service, powers of efficient and useful ac- 
tion!”? We recognize at once the sound sense of 
his statement. And all that is exactly what the 
One whom we call “The Master,” said nineteen 
hundred years ago—‘If ye know these things, 
happy are ye if ye do them”—and only then. 


We cannot live in these days with the teeming 
population of the world about us, without organi- 
zation and machinery. The highly organized, 
machine-using community will undersell and 
starve out any community which undertakes to 
maintain that simpler and perhaps more whole- 
some method of production which prevailed in the 
time of Ruth. That fine old shoemaker in Iowa 
would be unable today to compete with Lynn and 
Brockton. He would speedily go to the wall under 
the onslaught of the shoemaking machines. 

But for all that, there is a certain deadliness 
about it which must be faced and feared—and 
overcome. Here are the ants, bees and wasps! 
They have brought this method of organized pro- 
duction well-nigh to perfection. They are all well- 
fed, well-housed and their busy life moves along 
with scarcely a jar. When you look at the bee- 
hive, you feel moved to say, “How well they 
do it.” 

But who wants to be an ant or a bee or a wasp! 
Who wants to be just another cog in the wheel! 
Who wants to be just another item in a machine- 

129 


Where Do You Liver 


ridden system which sacrifices the man to the 
thing! We have no right to barter away those 
spiritual values which make up personality for 
the sake of increased production and increased 
profits. The spirit of the living creature cries out 
against that whole method as economic blas- 
phemy. The power to think, the spirit of initia- 
tive, the chance to exercise one’s own will—these 
are the values which stand supreme! If we sacri- 
fice them, we do it at our peril. 


Here in a well-known short story there was a 
fool who thought that a man’s life consisted in 
the abundance of the things that he possessed! 
The more things he owned, the more of a man he 
was. The cynic, Diogenes, said that a man’s life 
was to be computed in terms of the things he 
could do without. 

Which one was right? Neither one was right! 
Your own common sense tells you, and your 
Heavenly Father knoweth, that ye have need of 
all these things to enrich, to ennoble, to beautify 
human existence. Food, clothing, shelter; faith, 
hope, love; knowledge, beauty, affection; courage, 
aspiration, high resolve! By these men live, for 
men live by all the great words which proceed 
out of the mind of God. 

The things, however, are to be owned and used, 
they are to be mastered and consecrated by moral 
purpose—they are not to own and use us. The 

130 


IX—Men and Machines 


spirit of the living creature is not to be ground 
up by the multiplication of wheels for the sake of 
increased gain. The spirit of man made to wear 
the image of God is to assert its supremacy on all 
these fields of effort. 


In many parts of the world these days, men are 
eagerly and sometimes angrily discussing the 
question as to whether or not this white civiliza- 
tion of ours is a spent force. It all depends! We 
may be jolly well sure that wheels will not save 
it. Steam and electricity, submarines and aero- 
planes will not save it! The enemies of human 
well-being can use all of these appliances just as 
readily as the friends of human well-being can 
use them. The determining factor will be the per- 
sonal character of the living creature within the 
wheels. 

“The field is the world and the good seed” 
which is to make that field fruitful, “are the chil- 
dren of the kingdom.” If the trained men, who 
stand in positions of leadership and of large influ- 
ence, are men possessed of moral purpose, men 
with social sympathy, men with spiritual aspira- 
tion, then there is hope for the future. If, on the 
other hand, these men are only greedy mouths, 
each one looking only upon his own things and 
not upon the things of others, each one looking 
out for ‘(Number One” on the ground that if he 
does not nobody will, then the outlook is dark. 


131 


Where Do You Liver 


“Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs 
of thistles”—it would be a flat denial of the law 
of causation. No more do men gather personal 
character, social well-being, political stability from 
the spirit of greed and of selfish aggression. The 
only social order fit to live in, the only social 
order which will stand, will be one built upon the 
habit of friendliness and codperation, upon that 
spirit of consideration for others here outlined in 
the gospel of Christ. 


Science improves the wheels—that is all it can 
do. That is all it attempts to do, and it is not to 
be blamed for not attempting that which lies be- 
yond its power. It is the high office of religion to 
produce a finer type of living creature to direct 
those wheels. 

Science teaches men the truths of Chemistry, 
but, as Roger Babson said recently: “The trained 
chemist may go out to use his knowledge of 
Chemistry to secure a pure food supply, a pure 
milk supply, a pure water supply for his com- 
munity and thus become a public benefactor. He 
may go out to use his knowledge of Chemistry to 
adulterate food and other articles of commerce in 
order to make gain.” It all depends upon the 
moral character of the man as to whether his 
knowledge of Chemistry is an asset or a liability. 

Science teaches men the principles of the law. 
But the highly trained lawyer, fully equipped in 


132 


I X—Men and Machines 


his mastery of political science, may use his 
knowledge and skill to further the ends of justice 
and equity. He may, on the other hand, use his 
knowledge to enable men to evade the law and to 
get the best of their fellows by wrong means. It 
is the part of religion to lay upon the consciences 
of men those more august sanctions of righteous- 
ness, those more powerful deterrents from evil, 
which come from fellowship with the living God, 
causing them to use their knowledge and their 
skill for human betterment and not for human 
exploitation. 


Here in this highly organized, machine-ridden 
life of ours, how are all these evils to be reme- 
died? I do not know. No one knows in advance 
all the steps to be taken in those vast processes 
of social redemption. If I did know, and could 
hand it all out to you here at the end of a sermon 
in a half dozen neat formulas, I should waken to- 
morrow morning and find myself famous. 

But this one thing I do know—it must be done! 
It must be done, else “all our pomp of yesterday 
is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Industry must be 
moralized as other great human interests have 
been moralized. The commerce of the world must 
be made a splendid section of the spiritual life 
of the race and not the mere squabble of a lot of 
hungry animals for the best bones. The spirit of 
human brotherhood must find effective expression 


133 


Where Do You Live? 


in economic terms! Theodore Roosevelt used to 
say, “This country will not be a good place for 
any of us to live in unless we make it a good place 
for all of us to live in.” 

‘When our purposes are right, when our hearts 
are set upon making human life interesting, de- 
sirable, worthy for everybody, when the spirit of 
man is purified and fortified by its sense of fel- 
lowship with the spirit of the living God, we will 
be able to find the way. We will learn all the vari- 
ous steps to be taken in social redemption, as we 
go. We will make our map of that better world 
which is to be, on the road. There are some sitting 
here who will not taste of death until they see 
that better social order coming with power and 


great glory. 


134 


xX 
The Summons of a New Day 


HE Day of Judgment is not far away in the 
future. Every day is Judgment Day. Today 
is and tomorrow will be. Each day sits in judg- 
ment upon what was done the day before. “The 
morning after” brings in its verdict upon the way 
“the night before” was spent. It separates the 
sheep from the goats. It sets men on the right 
hand or the left of high achievement. If it finds a 
man with strength depleted, nerves disordered, 
and a dark brown taste in his heart, no further 
comment is needed. The day shall declare it, test- 
ing each man’s mode of life of what sort it is. 
Here in my text was a man on the eve of what 
proved to be the greatest day of his life. He was 
destined on the morrow to reach the highest level 
of thought and feeling he had ever known. In the 
quiet of the night before he heard a voice say, 
“Be ready in the morning and come up.” It was 
the summons of a new day uttered in those hours 
of preparation which led up to it. Hold that scene 
before you and let it talk! It has four things to 
say. 


135 


Where Do You Live? 


First, the scene suggests the challenge of a 
great opportunity. This man was leading a race 
of slaves out of the bondage of Egypt into the 
freedom and opportunity of a land of promise. 
His mind was busy with problems of organization 
and training. He was thinking about the political 
and industrial, the educational and social institu- 
tions which those people would need for their 
development. 

Suddenly he saw a mountain, steep and rugged, 
rising out of the level plain where he stood. Huge 
black clouds rested upon the top of it as if some 
visitor from the skies had come down robed in 
thick darkness. When the storm broke, the flash 
of the lightning was like a momentary glimpse of 
that divine glory which no man could see and live. 
The roar of the thunder was to him like the sound 
of a superhuman voice. And he heard that voice 
say, “Be ready in the morning and come up.” 

He was to climb that mountain the next day 
and there at the top of it gain such a vision of 
spiritual reality that he would feel for the rest 
of his life that he had seen his Maker face to face. 
He would see those principles of right and wrong 
which underlie all sound character and social well- 
being written by the finger of the Almighty on 
tables of stone. He would be called to write those 
principles into the life of a race until those He- 
brews would be competent to take the right of the 

136 


X—The New Day 


line in the religious leadership of the world for a 
thousand years. 

What a glorious chance to do something that 
would last! He could think of nothing else that 
whole evening. “Be ready in the morning,” he 
heard the voice say. We can imagine how he spent 
the night before—not in rioting and drunkenness, 
not in foolish prattle or in weak diversion. He 
would not have gone to the movies even though 
he had been at Hollywood instead of at Sinai. He 
would spend the early hours in thoughtfulness and 
the later hours in sound, sweet sleep, so that, re- 
freshed in mind and body, he would be ready 
when the day dawned to make the ascent. 

He had the necessary physical vigor to climb 
that mountain—he was no poor scrap of a man 
who had thrown away the best of himself in vice. 
He had that quality of mind which comes from 
thinking long and hard upon things which are 
vital. He had that purity of heart without which 
no man can see the Lord. He was “‘fit,” as the 
English say—he had no need to flinch. When the 
sun rose over the eastern hills he went straight to 
the top of Sinai and wrote his name above every 
other name in the early history of the Hebrew 
race. 


Now let that man’s experience in those hours 
of high privilege serve as a type! Here you are 
plodding along, it may be, on the dead level, 


137 


Where Do You Liver 


thinking ordinary thoughts and doing common- 
place things! Suddenly there rises before you 
some splendid opportunity. You may see it afar 
off or it may come upon you like a thief in the 
night. There it is—there is your chance to climb! 

It is the challenge of a new day calling upon 
you to use your powers to some high end. Honor 
and responsibility are there in waiting, if you have 
the strength and the sense to claim them. Oppor- 
tunity knocks once, we are told, at each man’s 
door and then passes on. “There is a tide in the, 
affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on 
to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is 
bound in shallows and in miseries.” It may be 
only a day’s march from some of those who are 
sitting here in quiet worship. If you listen you 
may hear that same divine voice saying to you, 
“Be ready when the opportunity comes and go 


up.” 


In the second place, the approach of maturity 
utters that same call. The world is a great deal 
larger than a school yard or a college campus— 
and ever so much more interesting. The school at 
its best is a preparation for life rather than life 
itself. It may well be the best sort of preparation, 
but life itself is lived mainly off the campus. 

It is no accident that we call the last day in 
college “(Commencement Day.” It is intended that 
now business of a more serious nature is to be 

138 


X—The New Day 


undertaken by the Seniors who lay aside their 
caps and gowns. The demands of mature life be- 
come a veritable Mount Sinai. The path of ascent 
in law or in medicine, in teaching or in the minis- 
try, in the work of the merchant, the manufac- 
turer, the engineer, is steep and rugged. It is not 
a place where we can stretch out comfortably on 
the green grass and pick four-leaved clovers. It is 
a stiff, hard climb all the way up. 

In these days none but well set-up men and 
women can hope to achieve distinction. Bodies 
clean and sound to furnish the necessary physical 
basis! Minds well trained and well stored with 
useful knowledge! Hearts possessed by moral 
purpose and high resolve! Souls that have gained 
the vision and the help of God! All these are im- 
perative. Hard tasks are just ahead. 

Weaklings will fail. Moral cowards will be put 
into the discard. Loafers, who were dreaming 
when they were supposed to be thinking, follow- 
ing the line of least resistance when they should 
have been putting up a good fight, will go down 
like ninepins before a well-placed ball. It is no 
child’s play to live a real life and to do real work 
in these days—therefore be ready when maturity 
calls. 


We find on every campus young people who 
“came to college.” They came under their own 
steam with some definite purposes in command. 


139 


Where Do You Live? 


We find others who were “sent to college.” The 
difference is like that between chalk and cheese. 
The ones who were sent to college are exposed to 
an education, but in most cases it does not take— 
they show themselves immune. The germs of edu- 
cation never get beneath their skins. The seeds 
of sound learning sown with a generous hand do 
not find lodgment in their lazy minds. As George 
Ade has it, “You can lead a boy to college but 
you can’t make him think.” Some of them ‘pass;” 
as our easy phrase has it—they pass, but some- 
how they never have enough in their hands or in 
their heads to “make it” and win the game. 

What a loss to have such opportunities within 
reach and not grasp them! Here are young people 
touching elbows with any number of their fellows 
who are sure to rise into positions of leadership 
in the years that lie ahead! Here is a body of 
teachers eager to know those young people more 
intimately if only they did not shy off and show 
themselves indifferent! Here is the world of na- 
ture, more fascinating than any epic poem or book 
of fiction. Here are all the greatest minds of the 
past on the shelves of the library waiting to have 
a word with you if you would only reach up and 
take them down. Here is Jesus Christ, Lord of 
the Ages, standing before each life saying: “Be- 
hold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone 
will hear my voice and open the door I will come 
in.” His entrance into any life means character of 

140 


X—The New Day 


the highest type and a destiny which will outlast 
and outshine the stars. Do you wonder that to 
those who have eyes to see, every bush on the 
campus burns with a mysterious fire and out of 
it there comes a voice saying to each passer-by, 
‘Make the best use of all these facilities and go 
up.” 

How many of you have seen Borglum’s statue 
of Lincoln at Newark? It stands in a public park 
and it shows the figure of our greatest American 
seated. Little children come and climb up on his 
knees and lean upon his strong arms. One day a 
Russian immigrant with long hair and alien dress 
was seen standing before the statue. His little 
daughter, who had been at school, was explaining 
to him who Lincoln was, and what he had done. 
The man listened eagerly as the child told her 
story in their native tongue. When she finished, 
he lifted her up until her face was level with that 
of Lincoln and bade her kiss the great bronze 
cheek. 

His own life had been starved and stunted by 
the hard conditions in the land of his birth. He 
had never had a chance. But here in this land of 
opportunity which had exalted to the highest place 
of honor a man who was born in a log cabin, a 
man who in his boyhood was privileged to attend 
school only twelve months all put together, that 
Russian peasant saw that his child would have 
her chance. He wanted her to be on good terms 


I4I 


Where Do You Live? 


with the best there was. He wanted her to be in 
touch with the spirit of Lincoln, the spirit of one 
who said, “With malice toward none, with charity 
for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us 
to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work 
in which we are engaged.” God grant that the Rus- 
sian’s silent prayer may find its answer in that 
child’s life! America spells opportunity for a mul- 
titude of boys and girls—may they be ready, as 
they move forward into maturity, to go up. 


In the third place, we hear that summons in 
the problems which the war has brought. We are 
living through one of the great searching crises 
of human history. For centuries other men will 
turn back to study the events of the last ten 
years. They will see the significance of it all more 
clearly than we do, in the light of that which well 
may follow. 

Now that a certain measured victory has been 
won by physical force, there comes the harder, 
higher task of winning the victory of the spirit. 
Will we indeed have peace? Will justice prevail? 
Will right principles bear rule in industry, in 
statecraft, in racial contacts? Will this thing 
which we call civilization show itself civilized? 

It all depends. Here are problems so vast and 
so intricate as to all but stagger the mind and 
conscience of the race! If we are to do our work 
as well as our forefathers did theirs, we shall have 


142 


X—The New Day 


to be stronger, wiser, and better than they were 
by so much as our tasks are greater. 

In the face of a world waiting to be rebuilt, 
how can any man lag back or drag along on some 
low level of thought and feeling! What right has 
anyone with hands and feet and a head to shirk! 
The bare sight of it all might well shame every 
thoughtless pleasure seeker, every social parasite, 
every moral dullard into something of heroic 
action. | 

Mount Sinai is just ahead, speaking above the 
roar and crash of these terrible scenes through 
which the world has just passed, saying to every 
man of us, “Thou shalt.” In the gray uncertain 
light of this dawning of a better day the divine 
voice is saying, “Be ready to take those principles 
of personal and social well-being which you have 
seen written across the sky in letters of fire and 
write them into a better social order.” And for 
that high task mental and moral preparedness is 
imperative. 


When war with Spain threatened in 1898, Ad- 
miral Dewey was in command of our Asiatic 
squadron. He had spent fifty years in the service 
of his country. He had made it the business of his 
life to be ready. He had gotten his ships together, 
coaled them, fitted them out with food and muni- 
tions and had them at Hong Kong the very day 
that the battleship Maine was blown up in the 


143 


Where Do You Live? 


harbor at Havana. He had studied the Philip- 
pines and the entrance to the harbor of Manila 
until he knew it as a college boy knows his own 
campus. When war was declared and the order 
was cabled to him, “Destroy the Spanish fleet and 
take Manila,” he went in and did it without the 
loss of a single ship—without the loss of a man. 
He was ready. 

Now “Peace hath her victories no less re- 
nowned than war.” The solution of these prob- 
lems in commerce and in government, in educa- 
tion and in religion, demands a service no less 
competent and heroic. It cannot be done by rule 
of thumb, nor by clever guesses, nor by graceful 
outbursts of feeling. It can only be done by men 
and women who know what they are about, by 
men and women who understand the material with 
which they have to deal, by men and women who 
have something of the mind of Christ. 

If industry is to be moralized as other great 
human interests have been moralized, if educa- 
tion is to be the training of the spirit no less than 
the filling of the mind with sound knowledge, if 
the cause of democracy is not to go down in de- 
feat, if the nations of the world are to be set 
together in a great brotherhood of joint endeavor 
for the common good, then we must have not only 
gifted leaders here and there—we must have also 
ranks upon ranks of plain everyday people with 
the necessary preparedness of mind and heart to 


144 


X—The New Day 


do the hard things which will have to be done. 
Lift up your eyes and look, for the fields are 
white to the harvest. Listen and you will hear 
that same voice saying to you, “Be ready in this 
day of social rebuilding and go up.” 

It is not over, over there, and it is not over, 
over here. There is another and a harder struggle 
still in progress. It is the struggle of the exploited 
against the exploiters, big and little, personal and 
corporate. It is the struggle of those who work 
with hand or brain against those who have fallen 
into the disgraceful habit of eating their bread 
by the sweat of other men’s brows. It is the strug- 
gle for the principle of equality before the law, 
for a more democratic spirit in the control of the 
greater industries, for a more equitable distribu- 
tion of the good things of life, for a steadier exal- 
tation of the human values which are at stake. 

In a word, it is the struggle for the establish- 
ment of the kingdom of God on earth, for the 
sway and rule of the spirit that was in Christ to 
replace the spirit of greed, of selfish aggression, 
of inhumanity, which in these recent years has all 
but wrecked the white civilization of the race. 
The outcome of that struggle will depend upon 
our preparedness to furnish the necessary moral 
stamina to see it through. There is a great day 
dawning if we will only have it so—be ready to 
give the best you have to the highest you see! 


145 


Where Do You Liver 


In the fourth place we hear that same summons 
from a world unseen. How brief it all is at best! 
“The days of our years are three score years and 
ten, and if by reason of strength they be four 
score years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow 
and it is soon cut off. So teach us to number our 
days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom! 
Satisfy us early with thy mercy! Establish thou 
the work of our hands and let the beauty of the 
Lord our God be upon us!” It is a prayer which 
every thoughtful person feels moved to make even 
before his sun has passed the meridian. 

I never undertake to map out the future world 
into those contrasting sections which men call 
heaven and hell—I have not the necessary data. 
I distrust the efforts of all those people who try 
to measure off the city of God in kilometers—they 
have not the necessary data either. But I believe 
in life immortal with all my soul—the reasons for 
that faith are too many to be stated here. 

And I feel sure that in the unseen world it will 
be well with those who have been striving to do 
what they believe to be the will of God and that 
it will not be well with those who have chosen 
some lower line of action. There I leave it. But in 
the face of such a possibility even—a possibility 
in the strength of which millions of the wisest and 
best of men have lived and wrought—what inter- 
est can be more vital than that of so ordering 

146 


X—The New Day 


one’s conduct as to make it a suitable preparation 
for that longer, larger life to come! 

It is tomorrow even more than yesterday which 
makes today what it is—and that is saying a 
great deal. All the yesterdays have had their part 
in determining our present status, but all the 
tomorrows as well have been casting the spell of 
their influence upon us. And if there be an endless 
series of tomorrows awaiting us, then how mighty 
becomes their appeal! 


How sure of life eternal humanity has been at 
its best! How sure the perfect, the typal, the 
representative man, the Son of Man, was! He did 
not argue nor speculate, he affirmed. He was look- 
ing into an open grave when he said to a bereaved 
family, “I am the resurrection and the life—he 
that believeth in me shall never die.” He was fac- 
ing arrest and crucifixion which came within an 
hour, when he said to his frightened disciples: 
“Let not your heart be troubled. I go to prepare 
a place for you. Because I live ye shall.’’ He was 
hanging on a cross, where his own life was fast 
ebbing away, when he said to a fellow sufferer 
who had turned to him in penitence, “Today shalt 
thou be with me in Paradise.” 

I know of no one whose judgment I would 
sooner trust in that field of inquiry and of hope 
than his. Jesus Christ brought life and immortal- 
ity to light by what he said, by what he did, by 

147 


Where Do You Liver 


what he was and is, in the glad experiences of 
millions of people who have learned through him 
to live by the power of an endless life. 

When I was a pastor in California, a brother 
minister in San Francisco dropped dead one Sun- 
day morning as he stood before the mirror shav- 
ing. It had been his custom at such times to lay 
his Bible open on the dresser beside him and to 
use those moments for memorizing certain verses 
of Scripture upon which his eye might rest. His 
wife heard him fall that morning and when she 
ran to his room, she noticed that his Bible lay 
open as usual. When she came back later, she 
found that he had opened it that day at this very 
passage in Exodus where my text stands. 

I wonder if his eyes were resting upon these 
words as he passed on,—“And the Lord said to 
Moses, Be ready in the morning and come up to 
present thyself before me.” He was a real man— 


“One who never turned his back but marched 
breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed though right were worsted, 
wrong would triumph: 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake.”’ 


Look ahead to that greater tomorrow and greet 
the unseen with a cheer! Always with a cheer! 


148 








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